Network virtualization substrate with parallelized data plane

Network virtualization provides the ability to run multiple concurrent virtual networks over a shared substrate. However, it is challenging to design such a platform to host multiple heterogenous and often highly customized virtual networks. Not only high degree of flexibility is desired for virtual networks to customize their functions, fast packet forwarding is also required. This paper presents PdP, a flexible network virtualization platform capable of achieving high speed packet forwarding. A PdP node has multiple machines to perform packet processing for virtual networks hosted in the system. To forward packets in high speed, the data plane of a virtual network in PdP can be allocated with multiple forwarding machines to process packets in parallel. Furthermore, a virtual network in PdP can be fully customized. Both the control plane and data plane of a virtual network run in virtual machines so as to be isolated from other virtual networks. We have built a proof-of-concept prototyping PdP platform using off-the-shelf commodity hardware and open source software. The performance evaluation results show that our system can closely match the best-known packet forwarding speed of software router running in commodity hardware.

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