Authors: Bong-yeol Yu, Gyeongsik Yang, Heesang Jin, and Chuck Yoo.
Venue: 2019 International Conference on Information Networking (ICOIN), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2019, pp. 242-247, doi: 10.1109/ICOIN.2019.8718167. (2019)
Abstract: Network virtualization is a fundamental technology for datacenters and upcoming wireless communications (e.g., 5G). It takes advantage of software-defined networking (SDN) that provides efficient network management by converting networking fabrics into SDN-capable devices. Moreover, white-box switches, which provide flexible and fast packet processing, are broadly deployed in commercial datacenters. A white-box switch requires a specific and restricted packet processing pipeline; however, to date, there has been no SDN-based network hypervisor that can support the pipeline of white-box switches. Therefore, in this paper, we propose WhiteVisor: a network hypervisor which can support the physical network composed of white-box switches. WhiteVisor converts a flow rule from the virtual network into a packet processing pipeline compatible with the white-box switch. We implement the prototype herein and show its feasibility and effectiveness with pipeline conversion and overhead.