Abstract
Network virtualization is one of the key components for the multi-tenancy services in the datacenter environment, where overlay layer 2-in-layer 3 tunneling protocols have gained wide traction. These overlay tunneling protocols assist in overcoming the scalability challenges associated with the traditional network virtualization primitives such as VLAN, and they enable tenants to use their own IP/MAC addresses while ensuring traffic isolation. However, the tunneling protocols have introduced compatibility and performance issues. This paper discusses the issues of the tunneling protocols and proposes a scalable edge-overlay solution for network virtualization in multi-tenant datacenters. The proposed solution leverages OpenFlow to control and forward the tenants' traffic without using additional encapsulation. Also, it allows the tenants to use their IP/MAC addressing scheme. We have implemented and evaluated the proposed solution, and the results from the experiments demonstrate that our solution provides higher performance than the tunneling protocols.