Data Center Network Virtualization: A Survey

TLDR

Data centers are increasingly critical for diverse Internet services, yet current architectures lack flexibility, resulting in poor QoS, deployability, manageability, and security, which motivates the exploration of network virtualization. This survey reviews existing data center network virtualization proposals, compares them in detail, and outlines key research challenges and future directions. The authors survey and compare current virtualization approaches in data center networks. Virtualized data centers promise improved management flexibility, lower cost, scalability, better resource utilization, and energy efficiency.

Abstract

With the growth of data volumes and variety of Internet applications, data centers (DCs) have become an efficient and promising infrastructure for supporting data storage, and providing the platform for the deployment of diversified network services and applications (e.g., video streaming, cloud computing). These applications and services often impose multifarious resource demands (storage, compute power, bandwidth, latency) on the underlying infrastructure. Existing data center architectures lack the flexibility to effectively support these applications, which results in poor support of QoS, deployability, manageability, and defence against security attacks. Data center network virtualization is a promising solution to address these problems. Virtualized data centers are envisioned to provide better management flexibility, lower cost, scalability, better resources utilization, and energy efficiency. In this paper, we present a survey of the current state-of-the-art in data center networks virtualization, and provide a detailed comparison of the surveyed proposals. We discuss the key research challenges for future research and point out some potential directions for tackling the problems related to data center design.