The Bottlenecked Virtual Network Problem in Bandwidth Allocation for Network Virtualization

Internet is becoming unable to overcome the challenges required by new services due to the lack of coordination among Internet service providers. This situation, frequently called network ossification, makes increasingly hard the deployment and the testing new network technologies. Network Virtualization has emerged as one solution of this problem. One network (substrate network), composed of physical nodes (e.g. routers) interconnected by means of links, may be used to create several isolated virtual networks, formed by virtual nodes and links, sharing the physical resources of the substrate network. One of the known problems of network virtualization is the allocation of physical resources. An uncontrolled allocation of bandwidth might entail bottlenecked virtual networks. The main goal of this paper is to analyze the problem of bandwidth allocation among virtual networks and to show mechanisms to offer a fair bandwidth distribution.