Development of a Virtualized Application Networking Infrastructure Node

This paper describes the design of a virtualized application and networking infrastructure (VANI) node that can be used to facilitate network architecture experimentation. Currently the VANI nodes provide four classes of physical resources: processing, reconfigurable hardware, storage and interconnection fabric, but the set of sharable resources can be expanded. Virtualization software allows slices of these resources to be apportioned to VANI nodes that can in turn be interconnected to form virtual networks that can operate according to experimental network and application protocols. We discuss the design decisions that have been made in the development of this system and we provide a detailed description of the prototype, including how users interact with the resources and the interfaces provided by the virtualization layers.