Data Center Network Virtualization: A Survey

• Published in: IEEE Communications surveys and tutorials 2013, Vol.15 (2), p.909-928
• Main Authors: Bari, M. F., Boutaba, R., Esteves, R., Granville, L. Z., Podlesny, M., Rabbani, M. G., Qi Zhang, Zhani, M. F.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Bandwidth; Computer architecture; Data Center Architecture; Data centers; Network architecture; Network topology; Virtualization; Virtualized Data Center
• ISSN: 1553-877X; 1553-877X; 2373-745X
• DOI: 10.1109/SURV.2012.090512.00043

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.