Design and Implementation of Network Virtualization Management System

Due to the recent network service market trends, network infrastructure providers must make their network infrastructures tolerant of network service complexity and swift at providing new network services. To achieve this, we first make a design decision for the single domain network infrastructure in which we use network virtualization and separate the network service control and management from the network infrastructure and leave the resource connectivity control and management in the network infrastructure so that the infrastructure can maintain simplicity and the network service can become complex and be quickly provided. Along with the decision, we construct an architecture of the network infrastructure and a network management model. The management model defines a slice as being determined by abstracted resource requirements and restructures the roles and planes from the viewpoint of network infrastructure usability so that network service requesters can manage network resources freely and swiftly in an abstract manner within the authorities the network infrastructure operator provides. We give the details of our design and implementation for a network virtualization management system along with the model. We deployed and evaluated our designed and implemented management system on the Japan national R&E testbed (JGN-X) to confirm the feasibility of our management system design and discuss room for improvement in terms of response time and scalability towards practical use. We also investigated certain cases of sophisticated network functions to confirm that the infrastructure can accept these functions without having to be modified.