CoVisor: a compositional hypervisor for software-defined networks
Xin Jin, Jennifer Gossels, Jennifer Rexford, David P. Walker · 2015
We present CoVisor, a new kind of network hypervisor that enables, in a single network, the deployment of mul-tiple control applications written in different program-ming languages and operating on different controller platforms. Unlike past hypervisors, which focused on slicing the network into disjoint parts for separate control by separate entities, CoVisor allows multiple controllers to cooperate on managing the same shared traffic. Con-sequently, network administrators can use CoVisor to as-semble a collection of independently-developed “best of breed ” applications—a firewall, a load balancer, a gate-way, a router, a traffic monitor—and can apply those ap-plications in combination, or separately, to the desired traffic. CoVisor also abstracts concrete topologies, pro-viding custom virtual topologies in their place, and al-lows administrators to specify access controls that regu-late the packets a given controller may see, modify, mon-itor, or reroute. The central technical contribution of the work is a new set of efficient algorithms for composing controller policies, for compiling virtual networks into concrete OpenFlow rules, and for efficiently processing controller rule updates. We have built a CoVisor pro-totype, and shown that it is several orders of magnitude faster than a naive implementation. 1