Network infrastructure control for virtual campuses

• Autor(a) principal: Cardoso, Igor Duarte
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/14707
• topic: Engenharia de computadores; Redes de computadores; Computação em nuvem; Arquitectura de redes

This dissertation provides a way to merge Cloud Computing infrastructures with traditional or legacy network deployments, leveraging the best in both worlds and enabling a logically centralized control for it. A design/architecture is proposed to extend existing Cloud Computing software stacks so they are able to manage networks outside the Cloud Computing infrastructure, by extending the internal, virtualized network segments. This is useful in a variety of use cases such as incremental Legacy to Cloud network migration, hybrid virtual/ traditional networking, centralized control of existing networks, bare metal provisioning and even offloading of advanced services from typical home gateways into the operator, improving control and reducing maintenance costs. An implementation is presented and tested on top of OpenStack, the principal Open-Source Cloud Computing software stack available. It includes changes to the API, command line interface and existing mechanisms which previously only supported homogeneous vendor equipment, such that they support any hardware and be able to automate their provisioning. By using what is called External Drivers, any organization (an hardware vendor, a Cloud provider or even a telecommunications operator) can develop their own driver to support new, specific networking equipment. Besides this ease of development and extensibility, two drivers are already developed in the context of this work: one for OpenWrt switches/routers and one for Cisco EtherSwitch IOS switching modules. Test results indicate that there are low penalties on latency and throughput, and that provisioning times (for setting up or tearing down networks) are reduced in comparison with similar maintenance operations on traditional computer networks.