A Service-Aware Virtualized Software-Defined Infrastructure

The Internet infrastructure is gradually improving its flexibility and adaptability due to the incorporation of new promising technologies, such as the software-defined networks and the network function virtualization. The main goal is to meet the diverse communication needs of the users, while the global system operation satisfies the business and societal goals of the infrastructure and service providers. This calls for solutions that consider both local and global network viewpoints and provide sophisticated system control in a stable and predictable way, while being service-aware. We propose a fully integrated solution along these lines: the VLSP, a service-aware software-defined infrastructure for networks and clouds. The VLSP consists of three main distributed systems: a facility performing uniformly logically-centralized management and control of the infrastructure, called the virtual infrastructure management; an information management infrastructure able to maintain an accurate view of the infrastructure environment at both the local and system levels, called the virtual infrastructure information service; and a lightweight virtualization hypervisor able to perform configuration changes in the infrastructure resources, called the lightweight network hypervisor. We discuss representative use-case scenarios, while we demonstrate how VLSP tunes performance trade-offs for particular service demands.