In this paper we will investigate the deficiencies and the achievements of today's Internet. We outline how Network Virtualization (NV) can overcome the shortfalls of today's networks, how it paves the way for the Future Internet, and how it can facilitate the convergence of currently different networks. The major building blocks of NV are the a) use of application-specific routing overlays, b) the safe consolidation of resources by OS virtualization on a generic infrastructure, and c) the exploitation of the network diversity for performance enhancements and for new business models, such as the provisioning of intermediates nodes or path oracles. Furthermore, we detail a more elaborate concept for network virtualization, which is denoted as Transport Virtualization (TV). TV transfers the concept of location independence of resources to the area of data transport in communication networks.
