Dynamic Virtual Network Allocation for OpenFlow Based Cloud Resident Data Center

Dynamic virtual network allocation is a promising traffic control model for cloud resident data center which offers virtual data centers for customers from the provider’s substrate cloud. Unfortunately, dynamic virtual network allocation designed in the past was aimed to the Internet so it needs distributed control methods to scale with such a large network. The price for the scalability of the completely distributed control method at both virtual layer and substrate layer is the slow convergence of algorithm and the less stability of traffic. In this paper, we argue that the distributed controls in both virtual and substrate networks are not necessary for the cloud resident data center environment, because cloud resident data center uses centralized controller as the way to give network control features to customers. In fact, we can use the centralized algorithm in each virtual data center which is not very large network and the distributed algorithm is only needed in substrate network. Based on the specific properties of this model, we have used optimization theory to re-design the substrate algorithm for periodically re-adjusting virtual link capacity. Results from theoretical analysis, simulations, and experiments show that our algorithm has faster convergence time, simpler calculation and can make better use of the feedback information from virtual networks than the previous algorithm. key words: network virtualization, OpenFlow, data center, centralized controller, traffic management