LTSS: Load-Adaptive Traffic Steering and Forwarding for Security Services in Multi-Tenant Cloud Datacenters

Currently, different kinds of security devices are deployed in the cloud datacenter environment and tenants may choose their desired security services such as firewall and IDS (intrusion detection system). At the same time, tenants in cloud computing datacenters are dynamic and have different requirements. Therefore, security device deployment in cloud datacenters is very complex and may lead to inefficient resource utilization. In this paper, we study this problem in a software-defined network (SDN) based multi-tenant cloud datacenter environment. We propose a load-adaptive traffic steering and packet forwarding scheme called LTSS to solve the problem. Our scheme combines SDN controller with TagOper plug-in to determine the traffic paths with the minimum load for tenants and allows tenants to get their desired security services in SDN-based datacenter networks. We also build a prototype system for LTSS to verify its functionality and evaluate performance of our design.