A service oriented broker-based approach for dynamic resource discovery in virtual networks

In the past few years, the concept of network virtualization has received significant attention from industry and research fora. This concept applies virtualization to networking infrastructures by enabling the dynamic creation of several co-existing logical network instances (or virtual networks) over a shared physical network infrastructure (or substrate network). Due to the potential it offers in terms of diversifying existing networks and ensuring the co-existence of heterogeneous network architectures on top of shared substrates, network virtualization is often considered as an enabler of a polymorphic Internet and a cornerstone of the future Internet architecture. One of the challenges associated with the network virtualization concept is the description, publication, and discovery of virtual resources that can be composed to form virtual networks. To achieve those tasks, there is a need for an expressive information model facilitating information representation and sharing, as well as an efficient resource publication and discovery framework. In this paper, we propose a service oriented, broker-based framework for virtual resource description, publication, and discovery. This framework relies on a novel service-oriented hierarchical business model and an expressive information model for resources/services description. The detailed framework's architecture is presented, and its operation is illustrated using a REST-based content distribution scenario. Furthermore, a proof-of-concept prototype implementation realized using various technologies/tools (e.g. Jersey, JAXB, PostgreSQL, and Xen cloud platform) is presented along with a detailed performance analysis of the system. When compared to existing virtual resource discovery frameworks, our broker-based virtual resource discovery framework offers signification performance improvements of the virtual resources' discovery operation, in terms of response time (92.8% improvement) and incurred network load (77.3% improvement), when dealing with multiple resource providers. Furthermore, relying on a broker as intermediary role simplifies the resources' discovery and selection operations, and improves the overall efficiency of the virtual network embedding process.