Federation of the BonFIRE multi-cloud infrastructure with networking facilities

Network performance in terms of throughput, latency, packet loss or jitter significantly influences user's quality of experience of cloud applications. Network services impact on cloud applications performance and this impact is even more significant when the cloud infrastructure spreads over different administrative domains, such as in a federated cloud or hybrid-cloud scenarios. Given this strong coupling between cloud application performance and network performance there is great value to be gained by supporting advanced controlled networking functionalities between distributed cloud infrastructures. These functionalities would be useful to the Future Internet (FI) experimentation community as well as future production clouds. This paper describes an architecture and a set of procedures to interconnect a multi-cloud environment with advanced facilities for controlled networking. This integration allows the provisioning of customized network functions and services in support of experiments running in a multi-cloud test-bed. The possibility to control the network connectivity is a key feature to provide better performance for the experimenters' cloud applications. We focus on the details of federating three advanced networking facilities with the BonFIRE multi-cloud environment. These three networking facilities are: FEDERICA, which supports controlled routing; GÉANT's Bandwidth-on-Demand service and OFELIA that uses OpenFlow to provide Software Defined Network functionalities. The interconnections with FEDERICA and GÉANT are already active, while OFELIA is envisaged as future work for a third facility to interconnect.