Software Networks

4New-generation Protocols

Protocols are currently undergoing numerous mutations, owing to the advent of the Cloud and of SDN architectures. The legacy protocols based on routing of IP packets and MPLS (MultiProtocol Label Switching) are still in place for the connection of users or data transport, offered by the major operator networks. However, an entirely new generation of networks is emerging and fighting to earn a place in the new arsenal of operators and Cloud providers. Firstly, there are the networks within datacenters, which must provide a very fast link between the servers, of which there are thousands, or even tens or hundreds of thousands. The protocol cited most at present is TRILL (Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links). TRILL is a level-2 Ethernet network with extensions to facilitate routing in a level-2 Ethernet environment. Very broadly speaking, we can qualify TRILL as an Ethernet network encapsulated within an Ethernet network, enabling us to have a hierarchy of addresses and to carry out routing. We shall come back to this later on.

Then, there are inter-datacenter networks, which also carry enormous quantities of data, going from one sub-network to another sub-network. There are a certain number of possibilities that are mentioned in the literature and are found in reality with Cloud management providers. In general, they are extensions of VLAN (Virtual LAN) techniques to maintain consistent VLAN numbers, even when the datacenters are not in the same ...