Integration of SDN frameworks and Cloud Computing platforms: an Open Source approach

As a result of the explosion in the number of services offered over the Internet, network traffic has experienced a remarkable increment and is supposed to increase even more in the few next years. Therefore, Telco operators are investigating new solutions aiming at managing this traffic efficiently and transparently to guarantee the users the needed Quality of Service. The most viable solution is to have a paradigm shift in the networking field: the old and legacy routing will be indeed replaced by something more dynamic, through the use of Software Defined Networking. In addition to it, Network Functions Virtualization will play a key role making possible to virtualize the intermediate nodes implementing network functions, also called middle-boxes, on general purpose hardware. The most suitable environment to understand their potentiality is the Cloud, where resources, as computational power, storage, development platforms, etc. are outsourced and provided to the user as a service on a pay-per-use model. All of this is done in a complete dynamic way, as a result of the presence of the implementation of the above cited paradigms. However, whenever it comes to strict requirements, Telecommunication Networks are still underperforming: one of the cause is the weak integration among these paradigms to reactively intervene to the users' need. It is therefore remarkably important to properly evaluate solutions where SDN and NFV are cooperating actively inside the Cloud, leading to more adaptive systems. In this document, after the description of the state of the art in networking, the deployment of an OpenStack Cloud platform on an outperforming cluster will be shown. In addition, its networking capabilities will be improved via a careful cloud firewalling configuration; moreover, this cluster will be integrated with Open Source SDN frameworks to enhance its services. Finally, some measurements showing how much this approach could be interesting will be provided.