A Network Virtualization Framework for IP Infrastructure Provisioning

Cloud computing is a new model of consuming and delivering IT and infrastructure resources. It enables users to obtain what they need, as they need it, from advanced applications to IT infrastructure and platform services, including virtual infrastructure, servers and storage. It can provide significant economies of scale and greater business agility, while accelerating the pace of innovation. Network virtualization, as a key enabling technology in resource provisioning for cloud, has attracted extensive attention from both academia and industry. It takes cloud services to the next level by delivering optimised resources, on-demand utilisation, flexibility and scalability. This paper proposes a novel architectural solution for future cloud service providers based on the concept of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) framework and IP network virtualization. A number of associated schemes have also been designed as building blocks for the proposed framework, including resource description and abstraction mechanisms, virtual network request method and a resource broker mechanism named Marketplace. The proposed framework is able to respond quickly to the infrastructure needs for those cloud services with dynamic resizing of the infrastructure by aggregation or partition to meet capacity requirements of services. At the same time, it improves the utilisation of providers´ resources with the creation of an infrastructure incorporating the heterogeneous resources in the data centre. In addition, the proposed marketplace, which also allows the trading of IP network resources between infrastructure providers and cloud service providers, is an important and complementary innovation within the cloud landscape.