Analysis on Quality of Service Provisioning for Communication Services in Network Virtualization

The Internet is currently facing many new challenges that require fundamental changes in network architecture and service models. However the current Internet lacks the flexibility to adopt innovations in network architecture and service provisioning. To fend off this ossification, network virtualization has been propounded as a key attribute of the future inter-networking paradigm and is expected to play a crucial role in the next generation Internet. Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning for end-to-end communication services across heterogeneous network infrastructures is one of the key technical issues in network virtualization. The Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides a promising approach to tackling this challenging issue. The research presented in this article investigates application of SOA in network virtualization to facilitate QoS provisioning of communication services in the future Internet. This article proposes an analytical model for SOA-based service delivery in network virtualization, and develops analysis techniques for performance evaluation and resource allocation for service provisioning in network virtualization. Resource utilization for end-to-end QoS provisioning in network virtualization is also analyzed and compared with that of the conventional inter-domain QoS mechanism in the current Internet. The modeling approach and analysis techniques developed in this article are general and applicable to the heterogeneous networking systems in the future Internet for supporting various communication services.