Describing commercial virtual networks: Requirement analysis and TMF SID-based solution

Today, Network Virtualization (NV) plays an important role in the networking research and gains increasing interest in the business environment. In addition to technical enhancements, NV also allows more differentiated business models diversifying the traditional Internet Service Provider (ISP) role. A crucial prerequisite for such a new business world is a description methodology that allows the parties to negotiate about Virtual Networks (VNs). Such a common description model has to cover links and nodes, their key properties, capabilities and control interfaces. In this paper we detail the requirements for Virtual Network Descriptions (VNDs) exchanged in a business environment guided by a representative scenario. We then match existing description methodologies against these requirements and find that SID (formerly “Shared Information/Data Model”) from Telemanagement Forum (TMF) is the most promising candidate. For SID we propose usage directives and extensions to make the information model fulfill all requirements of a commercial VN environment.