Mosaic: Policy Homomorphic Network Extension

TL;DR

This paper addresses the complex challenge of extending and migrating enterprise networks to remote data centers while maintaining performance and security, proposing initial designs and validating their feasibility through experiments.

Contribution

It provides a first rigorous formulation of network extension and migration, along with preliminary design solutions and experimental validation.

Findings

Feasibility of network extension and migration designs demonstrated

Preservation of performance and security requirements validated

Initial solutions show promise for practical deployment

Abstract

With the advent of large-scale cloud computing infrastructure, network extension and migration has emerged as a major challenge in the management of modern enterprise networks. Many enterprises are considering extending or relocating their network components, in whole or in part, to remote, private and public data centers, in order to attain scalability, failure resilience, and cost savings for their network applications. In this paper, we conduct a first rigorous study on the extension and migration of an enterprise network while preserving its performance and security requirements, such as layer 2/layer 3 reachability, and middle-box traversal through load balancer, intrusion detection and ACLs. We formulate this increasingly important problem, present preliminary designs, and conduct experiments to validate the feasibility of our designs.