Implementing Network Virtualization for a Future Internet

Abstract

Abstract — The Internet has become an essential communication medium upon which billions of people rely every day. However, necessary evolution of the Internet has been severely limited by reliability constrains and social-economic factors. Experts fear that current growth rates will threaten the future of the Internet as a whole, despite the fact that new core technologies already exist. Network virtualization presents a promising approach to overcome ossification and facilitate service deployment for a future Internet. Exploring this approach, we present a prototype implementation which realizes a subset of the 4WARD virtual network (VNet) architecture, allowing multiple VNets to coexist on top of a shared physical infrastructure. We discuss the functionality of our prototype and demonstrate experimental results to assess its performance. I