A Survey of Network Isolation Solutions for Multi-Tenant Data Centers

The infrastructure-as-a-service model is one of the fastest growing opportunities for cloud-based service providers. It provides an environment that reduces operating and capital expenses while increasing agility and reliability of critical information systems. In this multitenancy environment, cloud-based service providers are challenged with providing a secure isolation service combining different vertical segments, such as financial or public services, while nevertheless meeting industry standards and legal compliance requirements within their data centers. In order to achieve this, new solutions are being designed and proposed to provide traffic isolation for a large numbers of tenants and their resulting traffic volumes. This survey highlights key challenges that cloud-based service providers might encounter while providing multitenant environments. It also succinctly describes some key solutions for providing simultaneous tenant and network isolation, as well as highlights their respective advantages and disadvantages. We begin with generic routing encapsulation introduced in 1994 in “RFC 1701,” and will conclude with today's latest solutions. We detail 15 of the newest architectures and then compare their complexities, the overhead they induce, their VM migration abilities, their resilience, their scalability, and their multidata center capacities. This paper is intended for, but not limited to, cloud-based service providers who want to deploy the most appropriate isolation solution for their needs, taking into consideration their existing network infrastructure. This survey provides details and comparisons of various proposals while also highlighting possible guidelines for future research on issues pertaining to the design of new network isolation architectures.