NaaS: Network-as-a-Service in the Cloud

Cloud computing realises the vision of utility computing.

Tenants can benefit from on-demand provisioning of

computational resources according to a pay-per-use model

and can outsource hardware purchases and maintenance.

Tenants, however, have only limited visibility and control

over network resources. Even for simple tasks, tenants

must resort to inefficient overlay networks.

To address these shortcomings, we propose Networkas-

a-Service (NaaS), a framework that integrates current

cloud computing offerings with direct, yet secure, tenant

access to the network infrastructure. Using NaaS, tenants

can easily deploy custom routing and multicast protocols.

Further, by modifying the content of packets onpath,

they can efficiently implement advanced network

services, such as in-network data aggregation, redundancy

elimination and smart caching.

We discuss applications that can benefit from NaaS,

motivate the functionality required by NaaS, and sketch

a possible implementation and programming model that

can be supported by current technology. Our initial simulation

study suggests that, even with limited processing

capability at network switches, NaaS can significantly increase

application throughput and reduce network traffic.