Survey on Network Virtualization Hypervisors for Software Defined Networking

By Andreas Blenk, Arsany Basta, Martin Reisslein, Wolfgang Kellerer. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 2015

305 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Software defined networking (SDN) has emerged as a promising paradigm for making the control of communication networks flexible. SDN separates the data packet forwarding plane, i.e., the data plane, from the control plane and employs a central controller. Network virtualization allows the flexible sharing of physical networking resources by multiple users (tenants). Each tenant runs its own applications over its virtual network, i.e., its slice of the actual physical network. The virtualization of SDN networks promises to allow networks to leverage the combined benefits of SDN networking and network virtualization and has therefore attracted significant research attention in recent years. A critical component for virtualizing SDN networks is an SDN hypervisor that abstracts the underlying physical SDN network into multiple logically isolated virtual SDN networks (vSDNs), each with its own controller. We comprehensively survey hypervisors for SDN networks in this paper. We categorize the SDN hypervisors according to their architecture into centralized and distributed hypervisors. We furthermore sub-classify the hypervisors according to their execution platform into hypervisors running exclusively on general-purpose compute platforms, or on a combination of general-purpose compute platforms with general- or special-purpose network elements. We exhaustively compare the network attribute abstraction and isolation features of the existing SDN hypervisors. As part of the future research agenda, we outline the development of a performance evaluation framework for SDN hypervisors.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/22b84819f2e7f02c97e3121b69d95cde872907fd

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In Computer Networks and Communications

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Software Defined Optical Networks (SDONs): A Comprehensive Survey (2015, background): “SDN hypervisor can create multiple isolated virtual SDN networks [80], [81].”
How Can Edge Computing Benefit From Software-Defined Networking: A Survey, Use Cases, and Future Directions (2017, background): “virtualization are feasible for abstraction and isolation, it is observed that there is a lack of complete performance evaluation [219].”
On Multi-Access Edge Computing: A Survey of the Emerging 5G Network Edge Cloud Architecture and Orchestration (2017, unknown): “A survey that brings light into the different network hypervisor architectures is presented in [113] considering various deployment solution options.”
Distributed SDN Control: Survey, Taxonomy, and Challenges (2018, methodology): “lenges [9]–[12], the SDN programming languages [13], the virtualization of SDN networks using hypervisors [14], the security challenge in SDN [15], the fault management chal-”
A Survey of Machine Learning Techniques Applied to Software Defined Networking (SDN): Research Issues and Challenges (2019, background): “For a more insightful discussion on SDN, please refer to [64]–[71].”
Integrating Renewable Energy Resources into the Smart Grid: Recent Developments in Information and Communication Technologies (2018, unknown): “, the flexible aggregation and slicing of network resources [55]–[57].”
A Survey on Software-Defined Wireless Sensor Networks: Challenges and Design Requirements (2017, background): “The virtualizer ensures that all information collected is collated to form a virtualisation of the network state to the controller [29], [141].”
Hybrid SDN Networks: A Survey of Existing Approaches (2018, background): “In network virtualization, hardware and software network resources can be combined to form a single virtual network resource object or a single resource can be “sliced” into multiple virtual resources [93], [94], [152]–[158].”