Hierarchical Creation of Virtual Networks

This paper describes a scalable and hierarchical virtual network creation (HVNC) protocol. The protocol encapsulates network control operations such as signaling and routing. It relies on a hierarchical organization of network resources and their managers. The network hierarchy of HVNC provides network-wide views of network resource status. This enables network-wide decisions such as balancing traffic loads among network domains and traffic isolation in accordance to policies. HVNC enables flexible and dynamic virtual network management including reconfiguration and failure recovery. These advantages come at the cost of higher setup and information storage costs when compared to standard service creation protocols. We characterize the advantages and costs of HVNC by simulation. The relatively high costs of HVNC make it more suitable to create long-lived high-bandwidth virtual networks. This type of virtual networks supports emerging technologies and applications such as grid and peer-to-peer computing and data-intensive e-science applications