Topology abstraction service for IP virtual private networks

VPN service providers (VSP) and IP-VPN customers have traditionally maintained service demarcation boundaries between their routing and signaling entities, and this has resulted in the VPNs viewing the VSP network as an opaque entity and therefore limiting any meaningful interaction between the VSP and the VPNs. The purpose of this research is to address this issue by enabling a VSP to share its core topology information with the VPNs as a service in a manner which is both practical and scalable. We use the notion of topology abstraction, which serves as a means of sharing the core topology information as abstract graphs associated with QoS metric information with the VPNs.;New problems arise when topology abstraction is provided as a managed service to the IP-VPNs, as the available core resources need to be summarized for advertising to VPN customers while maintaining maximum session performance and core resource utilization. These problems are addressed through novel topology abstraction schemes.;We validate this idea of enabling topology information sharing with the IP-VPNs as a topology abstraction service in the context of a challenging framework called managed dynamic VPN framework. The abstraction provided to a VPN as a TA service is generated using a novel process that enables fairness and service differentiation among the VPN customers.