A Virtual Middleboxes Network Placement Algorithm in Multi-tenant Datacenter Networks

Hardware middleboxes are widely used in current cloud datacenter to provide network functions such as firewalls, intrusion detection system, load balancers, etc. Unfortunately, they are expensive and unable to offer customized functions for individual tenant. To overcome this issue, there is an increasing interest in deploying software middleboxes to enable flexible security, network access functionality. This paper addresses the software middleboxes placement problem with minimum bandwidth guarantee. We first specify the model of tenants' requirement that specifies the need for virtual machines of application and middleboxes, as well as communication traffic. A virtual middlebox placement algorithm called MISSILE is then proposed to offer predictable network performance for each accepted tenant, and minimize datacenter bandwidth utilization. Extensive simulation results based on current large-scale datacenter networks verify that MISSILE is effective and provides network performance guarantee for tenants.