Achieving Sub-Second Downtimes in Internet Virtual Machine Live Migrations with LISP

Nowadays, the rapid growth of Cloud computing services is stressing the network communication infrastructure in terms of resiliency and programmability. This evolution reveals missing blocks of the current Internet Protocol architecture, in particular in terms of virtual machine mobility management for addressing and locator-identifier mapping. In this paper, we propose some changes to the Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) to cope this gap. We define novel control-plane functions and evaluate them exhaustively in the worldwide public LISP testbed, involving four LISP sites distant from a few hundred kilometers to many thousands kilometers. Our results show that we can guarantee service downtime upon virtual machine migration lower than the second across Asian and European LISP sites, and down to 300 ms within Europe. We discuss how much our approach outperforms standard LISP and triangular routing approaches in terms of service downtime as a function of datacenter-datacenter and client-datacenter distances. © 2013 IFIP