Wassim Haddad

vSP: Building a virtual Service Provider with off-the-shelf cloud services

The ability to connect through several service providers, is becoming common in both residential and enterprise networks with a high potential to enabling rich cloud-based network services for all. However, traffic engineering in such context remains a challenge as having different service providers means as well having different, independent, provider-specific policies that seldom work together, while often being conflicting. To overcome the hassle of trying to have a coherent traffic engineering based on independent ISPs that would truly enable rich cloud-based network services, we propose to create an over-the-top virtual Service Provider - vSP. We show that based on existing cloud services and off-the-shelf technology it is possible to easily deploy its own vSP, including an easy to use management framework allowing full policies control so to have a coherent traffic engineering while fully exploiting the underlying ISPs and thus benefit from network services offloaded to the cloud.

A Virtual Service Provider for SOHO Networks

The ability of SOHO networks to connect to the Internet through several Internet service providers, gives high potential to enable rich cloud-based network services for enterprises. Nevertheless, it remains a huge challenge for SOHOs to leverage such multi-homing and cloud networking capabilities. For such a reason, we introduce the vSP concept (virtual Service Provider). The idea of vSP is to hide the technical complexity inherent to multi-homing and allow SOHOs to seamlessly use their cloud resources. The role of the vSP is to orchestrate traffic between the different Internet Services Providers (ISPs) in order to maximize the cloud service performance without requiring any intervention of the SOHO network administrator.

Network in the Cloud: A map-and-encap approach

Data communications are essential in todays economy and most of enterprises rely on a fast and reliable Internet connection to control their production or sales. However, the cost of maintaining Internet connectivity is not negligible, as it requires manpower and capital immobilization. In order to limit the cost of data communications as well as to improve their flexibility, Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) has been proposed. The concept of NaaS is to outsource to the Cloud networking operations like load balancing or firewall. In this paper, we propose a technique based on the Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) to allow enterprise networks to effectively outsource their network operations to the Cloud.