vSP: building a virtual Service Provider with off-the-shelf cloud services
Résumé
Multihoming, connecting through several service providers, is becoming common in both residential and Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) with a high potential to enabling rich cloud-based network services for all. However, Traffic Engineering (TE) 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.
In order to overcome the hassle of trying to have a coherent TE 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 TE while fully exploiting the underlying ISPs and thus benefit from network services offloaded to the cloud.