Tese de Doutorado de Ivan Peter Lamb

Defesa de Tese de Doutorado

Aluno(a): Ivan Peter Lamb
Orientador(a): Weverton Luis da Costa Cordeiro
Coorientador(a): José Rodrigo Furlanetto Azambuja

Título: A Multi-Tenant and Target-Independent Programmable Data Plane Virtualization Architecture
Linha de Pesquisa: Arquiteturas, Protocolos e Gerência de Redes e Serviço

Data: 09/03/2026
Hora: 14:00
Local: Esta banca ocorrerá de forma híbrida (virtual e presencial), na sala Sala 215 / 43412 do Instituto de Informática/UFRGS e pelo link https://mconf.ufrgs.br/webconf/00162388.

Banca Examinadora:
-Alberto Egon Schaeffer Filho (UFRGS)
-Fabio Luciano Verdi (UFSCar)
-Christian Rodolfo Esteve Rothenberg (Unicamp)

Presidente da Banca: Weverton Luis da Costa Cordeiro

Resumo: With the migration of traditional computer networks to the Software-defined Networking paradigm, flexibility is a core feature that novel technologies must provide. In this context, virtualization is gaining traction in Programmable Data Planes (PDP) as a means of achieving greater flexibility, with several solutions in the literature for emulating or instantiating virtual programmable switches on the same host device. Virtualization has numerous advantages in this context, enabling multi-tenancy in programmable data/research center networks and greater device resource utilization. Nevertheless, enabling a complete multi-tenant solution requires management and security considerations not yet approached in previous investigations. Previous works focus mainly on the core underlying technology necessary to deploy multiple devices in the same physical host. To further advance PDP virtualization towards an industry-adopted technology, thi s thesis presents a PDP virtualization architecture based on program composition and access control for securely managing virtual switches from different tenants. It describes how the core elements of PDP virtualization are used to achieve a robust and modular solution. The proposed experiments highlight the ability to transparently manage virtual switches hosted in a single physical device in networking scenarios with multiple tenants and ascertain the low incurred overhead of the architecture in terms of control plane perceived delay. A novel approach to tackle the runtime reconfiguration of composition-based PDP virtualization is also presented. Concrete use cases of the virtualization solution, such as multi-tenant topology emulation in real hardware and modular data plane programming, are presented and discussed in this thesis. This thesis also hints at future work and how the modular design of the proposed architecture enables expansion of its functionalities.

Palavras-Chave: Software Defined Networking. Programmable Data Planes. Multi-Tenancy Virtualization