Identity Management and Resource Allocation in the Network Virtualization Environment

Due to the existence of multiple stakeholders with conflicting goals and policies, alterations to the existing Internet architecture are now limited to simple incremental updates; deployment of any new, radically different technology is next to impossible. To fend off this ossification, network virtualization has been propounded as a diversifying attribute of the future inter-networking paradigm. In this talk, we provide an overview of the network virtualization environment (NVE) and address two basic problems in this emerging field of networking research. The identity management problem is primarily concerned with ensuring interoperability across heterogeneous identifier spaces for locating and identifying end hosts in different virtual networks. We describe the architectural and the functional components of a novel identity management framework (iMark) that enables end-to-end connectivity across heterogeneous virtual networks in the NVE without revoking their autonomy. The virtual network embedding problem deals with the mapping of virtual nodes and links onto physical network resources. We argue that the separation of the node mapping and the link mapping phases in the existing algorithms considerably reduces the solution space and degrades embedding quality. We propose coordinated node and link mapping to devise two algorithms (D-ViNE and R-ViNE) for the online version of the problem under realistic assumptions and compare their performance with the existing heuristics

Dynamic resource management in SDN-based virtualized networks

Network virtualization allows for an abstraction between user and physical resources by letting a given physical infrastructure to be shared by multiple service providers. However, network virtualization presents some challenges, such as, efficient resource management, fast provisioning and scalability. By separating a network's control logic from the underlying routers and switches, software defined networking (SDN) promises an unprecedented simplification in network programmability, management and innovation by service providers, and hence, its control model presents itself as a candidate solution to the challenges in network virtualization. In this paper, we use the SDN control plane to efficiently manage resources in virtualized networks by dynamically adjusting the virtual network (VN) to substrate network (SN) mappings based on network status. We extend an SDN controller to monitor the resource utilisation of VNs, as well as the average loading of SN links and switches, and use this information to proactively add or remove flow rules from the switches. Simulations show that, compared with three state-of-art approaches, our proposal improves the VN acceptance ratio by about 40% and reduces VN resource costs by over 10%

Network service chaining with efficient network function mapping based on service decompositions

Network Service Chaining (NSC) is a service concept which promises increased flexibility and cost-efficiency for future carrier networks. The two recent developments, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN), are opportunities for service providers to simplify the service chaining and provisioning process and reduce the cost (in CAPEX and OPEX) while introducing new services as well. One of the challenging tasks regarding NFV-based services is to efficiently map them to the components of a physical network based on the services specifications/constraints. In this paper, we propose an efficient cost-effective algorithm to map NSCs composed of Network Functions (NF) to the network infrastructure while taking possible decompositions of NFs into account. NF decomposition refers to converting an abstract NF to more refined NFs interconnected in form of a graph with the same external interfaces as the higher-level NF. The proposed algorithm tries to minimize the cost of the mapping based on the NSCs requirements and infrastructure capabilities by making a reasonable selection of the NFs decompositions. Our experimental evaluations show that the proposed scheme increases the acceptance ratio significantly while decreasing the mapping cost in the long run, compared to schemes in which NF decompositions are selected randomly

Embedding of Virtual Network Requests over Static Wireless Multihop Networks

Network virtualization is a technology of running multiple heterogeneous network architecture on a shared substrate network. One of the crucial components in network virtualization is virtual network embedding, which provides a way to allocate physical network resources (CPU and link bandwidth) to virtual network requests. Despite significant research efforts on virtual network embedding in wired and cellular networks, little attention has been paid to that in wireless multi-hop networks, which is becoming more important due to its rapid growth and the need to share these networks among different business sectors and users. In this paper, we first study the root causes of new challenges of virtual network embedding in wireless multi-hop networks, and propose a new embedding algorithm that efficiently uses the resources of the physical substrate network. We examine our algorithm's performance through extensive simulations under various scenarios. Due to lack of competitive algorithms, we compare the proposed algorithm to five other algorithms, mainly borrowed from wired embedding or artificially made by us, partially with or without the key algorithmic ideas to assess their impacts.Comment: 22 page