No abstract

Network Virtualization is a promising concept to diversify the Future Internet architecture into separate Virtual Networks (VN) that can support simultaneously multiple network experiments, services and architectures over a shared substrate network. To take full advantage of this paradigm this paper addresses the challenge of assigning VNs to the underlying physical network in a distributed and efficient manner. A distributed algorithm responsible for load balancing and mapping virtual nodes and links to substrate nodes and links has been designed, implemented and evaluated. A VN Mapping Protocol is proposed to communicate and exchange messages between agent-based substrate nodes to achieve the mapping. Results of the implementation and a performance evaluation of the distributed VN mapping algorithm using a Multi-agent approach are reported.

In the future, virtual networks will be allocated, maintained and managed much like clouds offering flexibility, extensibility and elasticity with resources acquired for a limited time and even on a lease basis. Adaptive provisioning is required to maintain virtual network topologies, comply with established contracts, expand initial allocations on demand, release resources no longer useful, optimise resource utilisation and respond to anomalies, faults and evolving demands.In this paper, we elaborate on adaptive virtual resource provisioning to maintain virtual networks, allocated initially on demand, in response to a virtual network creation request. We propose a distributed fault-tolerant embedding algorithm, which relies on substrate node agents to cope with failures and severe performance degradation. This algorithm coupled with dynamic resource binding is integrated and evaluated within a medium-scale experimental infrastructure.

Virtual resource description and clustering for virtual network discovery.