VEIL: A "Plug-&-Play" Virtual (Ethernet) Id Layer for Below IP Networking
Sourabh Jain, Yingying Jennifer Chen, Zhi-Li Zhang, Saurabh Jain · 2009
This paper proposes VEIL-a novel, "plug-&-play" Virtual (Ethernet) Identifier (Id) Layer for below IP networking. The objective is two-fold: i) VEIL directly addresses the scalability, efficiency and reliability challenges facing the traditional Ethernet, while retaining its "plug-&-play" feature; ii) but perhaps more importantly, VEIL provides a uniform (below IP) convergence layer to support a large, dynamic and heterogeneous (layer-2) network that is capable of connecting hundreds of thousands or more diverse physical devices. The key idea in our design is to introduce a topology-aware, structured virtual id (vid) space onto which both physical identifiers as well as higher layer addresses/names are mapped. VEIL completely eliminates network-wide flooding in both the data and control planes, and thus is highly scalable and robust.