Role-based Campus Network Slicing

Abstract

The Internet has evolved greatly in this decade. For economic benefits, the management of Internet networks needs to adapt to mass changes without huge modifications in hardware and software. Especially in campus networks, there are a variety of users and devices with different Quality of Service (QoS) requirements and management policies. Software-defined networking (SDN) decouples the data and control planes. The separated control plan resides on a centralized controller to make networks easier to manage. In this paper, a role-based SDN campus network slicing is proposed by utilizing an authentication controller and the virtualization technology of FlowVisor to divide the campus network into several virtual networks according to the types of users. However, the mapping between the devices' MAC addresses and the users' roles results in a heavy loading problem on FlowVisor. Therefore, a VLAN-based slicing is introduced in this framework to offload the workload of FlowVisor for classifying packets into corresponding slices. Packets are appended with VLAN tags for recognizing types of users to lower the overhead of FlowVisor. Analyses of experimental results show that compared with MAC-based slicing, VLAN-based slicing can reduce the flow setup latency by 14% to 60% depending on the number of devices.