Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Network Virtualization is one of the main concepts on which the next generation network will be based. Many research groups in the US, Europe and elsewhere in the world are investing on different aspects of virtualized networks; and many network providers and vendors equipments are very interested in exploring how this concept and associated technologies would help solve their business problems and create new growth opportunities. This research will investigate the main challenges of network virtualization (NV), by investigating the following areas: how to discover and advertise network resources; how to create and manage a sliced node across diverse resources; how does virtualization extend to wireless and optical links; how to implement virtualization across diverse resources and across layers of protocol stack; how to manage slices; what kind of services will the network infrastructure providers offer to the network providers; what kind of capabilities are enabled by infrastructure virtualization. Behind these research challenges, there is a need to implement virtualized node, in order to validate and experiment the new infrastructure. This implementation will require revisiting some very important hardware and Os concepts such as VMM, Hypervisor, FPGA, Network Processor, models of resource isolation, resource scheduler, etc. The Netvirt project will introduce these concepts, which will be needed for sharing of firmware, processing power, memory, IO, and bandwidth.