Diverter: a new approach to networking within virtualized infrastructures

As virtualized data-centres become the back-end platforms behind a new generation of utility and cloud computing infrastructures (such as AmazonAWS [1]) their multi-tenancy, scale and complexity introduce new challenges that especially affect the networking layer. Multiple customers' requirements for varying logical network topologies must be simultaneously accommodated on the shared, underlying network fabric in a secure manner. Diverter is a new approach to network virtualization that targets these highly flexible, large-scale, multi-tenanted environments and advances the current state-of-the-art by implementing an efficient, fully distributed virtualized routing system that allows end-to-end communication between any endpoint with just a single network "hop". We have implemented a prototype of this solution that, in certain network configurations, achieves a throughput improvement of at least 66 % compared to alternative approaches.