Southbound Message Delivery With Virtual Network Topology Awareness in Clouds

—Southbound message delivery from the control plane to the data plane is one of the essential issues in multi-tenant clouds. A natural method of southbound message delivery is that the control plane directly communicates with compute nodes in the data plane. However, due to the large number of compute nodes, this method may result in massive control overhead. The Message Queue (MQ) model can solve this challenge by aggregating and distributing messages to queues. Existing MQ-based solutions often perform message aggregation based on the physical network topology, which do not align with the fundamental requirements of southbound message delivery, leading to high message redundancy on compute nodes. To address this issue, we design and implement VITA, the first-of-its-kind work on virtual network topology-aware southbound message delivery. However, it is intractable to optimally deliver southbound messages according to the virtual attributes of messages. Thus, we design two algorithms, submodular-based approximation algorithm and simulated annealing-based algorithm, to solve different scenarios of the problem. Both experiment and simulation results show that VITA can reduce the total traffic amount of redundant messages by 45%-75% and reduce the control overhead by 33%-80% compared with state-of-the-art solutions.