Resource Virtualization Techniques for Wide-Area Overlay Networks

As networks become an essential ingredient of modern business and government systems, there is an increasing demand for specialization for network services that can be tailored to the needs of individual organizations, especially for wide-area network connectivity. Currently, Internet service providers can only offer their clients very limited forms of customization simply because existing wide-area network resource management technologies do not support the level of flexibility and generality as required by user-specific or even application-specific adaptation. This project proposes to design, implement, and evaluate a network resource virtualization system called Sago, which allows multiple virtual networks to be overlaid on a single physical network, each having a unique network topology, per-virtual-link bandwidth guarantee, an overall network reliability characteristic, and even its own data-plane/control-plane processing functions. Sago includes a novel network resource allocation algorithm that takes into account both physical network topology and dynamic traffic demands, a network-wide fault tolerance mechanism that supports both node-level and link-level fault tolerance, and an integrated CPU/network scheduler that provides performance protection among virtual networks that have different control-plane or data-plane processing but share the same physical packet processing engines. The technologies developed in the Sago project are expected to become important building blocks for real-time content distribution networks, end-to-end quality of service guarantee over global corporate intranets, and application-specific adaptation of wide-area network services.