“Network Virtualization: State of the Art and Research Challenges” has been featured in the IEEE Communications Magazine’s July 2009 issue in its Network and Service Management Series. This one is a quick overview of a lot of things related to network virtualization: its past, present, and possible future. The main objective is to let the huge readership of the magazine (which includes all the members of IEEE ComSoc + others) know about the ongoing saga of network virtualization and next generation Internet.

Please have a look at the abstract below; a copy of the (sort of) final draft can be found in my publications page.

Recently network virtualization has been pushed forward by its proponents as a long-term solution to the gradual ossification problem faced by the existing Internet and proposed to be an integral part of the next-generation networking paradigm. By allowing multiple heterogeneous network architectures to cohabit on a shared physical substrate, network virtualization provides flexibility, promotes diversity, and promises security and increased manageability. However, many technical issues stand in the way of its successful realization. This article investigates the past and the state of the art in network virtualization along with the future challenges that must be addressed to realize a viable network virtualization environment.

Acceptance rate for this issue was 14.3% (four out of 28 submissions).

Update: This technical report has been superseded by an updated version published in the Computer Networks journal [LINK].

Finally, our survey on network virtualization is available as a technical report. If the abstract seems interesting (given below), you can download the report from here.

Due to the existence of multiple stakeholders with conflicting goals and policies, alterations to the existing Internet are now limited to simple incremental updates; deployment of any new, radically different technology is next to impossible. To fend off this ossification once and for all, network virtualization has been propounded as a diversifying attribute of the future inter-networking paradigm. By allowing multiple heterogeneous network architectures to cohabit on a shared physical substrate, network virtualization provides flexibility, promotes diversity, and promises security and increased manageability. In this paper, we present a network virtualization model with a set of quintessential design goals, survey the past and the state-of-the-art of network virtualization, and discuss the future challenges that must be addressed to realize a viable network virtualization model.

Since it is quite long (29 pages), here goes a brief summary. This article

1. puts network virtualization into a historical perspective,
2. presents a model network virtualization environment,
3. surveys existing projects that are directly or indirectly related to network virtualization,
4. summarizes key directions for future exploration.

We have tried our best it to make it informative and useful for the network virtualization research community. But any comment or critique from you will enrich it for sure. Don’t hesitate to grill or greet me. :-D

You should also check out my two presentations based on this survey: “An Introduction to Network Virtualization” and “Network Virtualization: Present and Future”.

On personal level, I have one chapter for my Master’s thesis. w00t !!!