Architecture for resource controllable NVE to meet service providers' dynamic QoS demands

To accommodate a wide variety of application services, the network virtualization environment (NVE) has received much attention. In an NVE, infrastructure providers (InPs) provide service providers (SPs) with virtual networks (VNs) using the InPs' substrate resources for the SPs' application services. Service providers have flexible requirements of topology, quality of service (QoS), and their dynamic changes on VNs. To meet all these requirements, traditional approaches based on performance guarantee relying only on InPs are inefficient and sometimes infeasible because they result in significant operational cost. We propose an architecture in which SPs can select appropriate resources from available resources and dynamically use the allocated resources depending on their application characteristics and user situations to meet their demands. In the proposed architecture, SPs can improve VN performance through resource control, and InPs are not required to have any performance guaranteed networks. Therefore, the proposed architecture can balance QoS and resource efficiency. We also present the basic design of the proposed architecture and show use cases and a prototype implementation using OpenFlow technologies.