Port-Space Isolation for Multiplexing a Single IP Address Through Open vSwitch

Large-scale network testbeds raise the problem of the exhaustion of IPv4 address space. Before the IPv6 is widely deployed, multiplexing IPv4 address for guest slivers is necessary. NAT is one of the typical ways for the multiplexing. Violating the end-to-end feature of the Internet, the NAT approach has well-known drawbacks in performance scalability and in supporting diverse services and applications. In this paper, we propose a method to share the host’s global IP address for all the guest slivers on a node and isolate their network usage in port-space. The idea is successfully implemented with Open vSwitch and deployed in the CoreLab platform. Benchmark result shows that the proposed solution is superior to NAT technique significantly.