NaaS: Network-as-a-Service in the Cloud

Cloud computing realises the vision of utility computing. Tenants can benefit from on-demand provisioning of computational resources according to a pay-per-use model and can outsource hardware purchases and maintenance. Tenants, however, have only limited visibility and control over network resources. Even for simple tasks, tenants must resort to inefficient overlay networks. To address these shortcomings, the authors propose Network-as-a-Service (NaaS), a framework that integrates current cloud computing offerings with direct, yet secure, tenant access to the network infrastructure. Using NaaS, tenants can easily deploy custom routing and multicast protocols.