Multi-Tenant Programmable Switch Virtualization Architecture
Ivan Peter Lamb, Theo Facen, Pedro Arthur Pinheiro Rosa Duarte, José Rodrigo Azambuja, Weverton Luis Da Costa Cordeiro · 2024
Virtualization is gaining traction in Programmable Data Planes (PDP), with several solutions in the literature for emulating or instantiating virtual programmable switches on the same host device. Virtualization has numerous advantages in this context, enabling multi-tenancy in programmable data center networks and greater device resource utilization. Nevertheless, enabling a complete multi-tenant solution requires management and security considerations not yet approached in previous investigations. This paper presents a PDP virtualization architecture based on program composition and access control for securely managing virtual switches from different tenants. Our experiments highlight the ability to transparently manage virtual switches hosted in the same physical device in networking scenarios with multiple tenants.