An Evaluation Of Sdn And Nfv Support For Parallel, Alternative Protocol Stack Operations

Virtualization on top of high-performance servers has enabled the virtualization of network functions like caching, deep packet inspection. Such Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is used to dynamically adapt to changes in network traffic and application popularity. In this paper, we demonstrate how the combination of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and NFV can support the parallel operation of different Internet architectures on top of the same physical hardware. We introduce our architecture for this approach and evaluate it through a live video streaming application in an actual testbed setup, using CloudLab. We use two vastly different protocol stacks, namely TCP/IP and NDN to demonstrate the capability of our approach. The evaluation of our approach shows that it introduces a new level of flexibility when it comes to operation of different Internet architectures on top of the same physical network.