A Datacenter Network Architecture for Low Latency, Automation and Virtualization

Future Datacenter networking must enable long-term innovation in an automated way, without decreasing the forwarding speed. Current Software Defined Networking (SDN) solutions are creating complex architectures that rely on layers of software overlays above often unknown hardware. This paper proposes Lodenet, a novel software-defined architecture for Datacenter networks that eliminates physical routers and switches, making simplification, visibility, isolation, access policies, service chaining and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) possible without overlays, and plus lowering forwarding latency. For this purpose, layer two is replaced, letting to servers the core function of forwarding packets, while the border, namely applications and services, receives precalculated routes from controller. A virtual switch prototype shows that, in the proposed network, forwarding latency is about 6 times lower than in traditional Linux virtualization environment.