SLA-driven Federated Cloud Networking: Quality of Service for cloud-based Software Defined Networks

Since the cloud paradigm becomes more and more popular for the dynamic resources allocation, new techniques and performance improvements for scalability as well as new cloud services on all three layers of the cloud stack were developed. Furthermore, another well covered topic is cloud federation concerning processing power and strength. However, the flexibility of the cloud is limited in terms of network services and federated networking between autonomous cloud data-center. With the promising opportunities of Software Defined Networking (SDN), this gap can be closed and enables cloud environments to establish networking federations between autonomous data-centers and virtual network partitioning in a single cloud infrastructure. In this paper we are introducing and describing an architectural approach for a generic layered model and API based software architecture to orchestrate and federate heterogeneous networks. In particular, we present an architecture that enables Quality of Service (QoS) aware configurations of network resources in a cloud infrastructure of one data-center and federated networking between different SDN based cloud networks over and above the data-center network edge. Furthermore, this architecture uses a Service Level Agreement (SLA) protocol and language to expose Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and to negotiate appropriated QoS constrains which are applied to the virtually sliced underlying network substrate. In this way, capabilities of the orchestration and the current utilization of the network are building the foundation for dynamic negotiated SLAs and the within guaranteed QoS of network resources. The approach presented in this paper will change today's IT landscape and allows every organization to purchase required network characteristics on demand. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.