iMark: An Identity Management Framework for Network Virtualization Environment

In recent years, network virtualization has been propounded as an open and flexible future internetworking paradigm that allows multiple virtual networks (VNs) to coexist on a shared physical substrate. Each VN in a network virtualization environment (NVE) is free to implement its own naming, addressing, routing, and transport mechanisms. While such flexibility allows fast and easy deployment of diversified applications and services, ensuring end-to-end communication and universal connectivity poses a daunting challenge. This paper advocates that effective and efficient management of heterogeneous identifier spaces is the key to solving the problem of end-to-end connectivity in an NVE. We propose iMark, an identity management framework based on a global identity space, which enables end hosts to communicate with each other within and outside of their own networks through a set of controllers, adapters, and well-placed mappings without sacrificing the autonomy of the concerned VNs. We describe the procedures that manipulate these mappings between different identifier spaces and provide performance evaluation of the proposed framework.