Port-space isolation for multiplexing a single IP address through open vSwitch

Large-scale network testbeds raise the problem of the ex- haustion of IPv4 address space. Before the IPv6 is widely deployed, mul- tiplexing 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.