On Virtualizing Ethernet Switches

The authors are interested in exploring how to virtualize network switches in order to create multiple logical switches from one physical switch. The motivation behind this is to be able to support multiple Research-And-Education (R&E) projects by offering each of them a logical switch that could coexist with other R&E projects' logical switches, so that each would have the equivalent of their own switch. This paper proposes an approach for virtualizing off-the-shelf Ethernet switches that have builtin support for creating isolated bandwidth partitions on their data-plane interfaces.