| Due to the existence of multiple stakeholders with conflicting goals and policies, alterations to the existing Internet architecture are now limited to simple incremental updates; deployment of any new, radically different technology is next to impossible. To fend off this ossification, network virtualization has been propounded as a diversifying attribute of the future inter-networking paradigm. However, many technical issues stand in the way toward its successful realization. In this thesis, we address two basic problems in the network virtualization environment.;The identity management problem is primarily concerned with ensuring interoperability across heterogeneous identifier spaces for locating and identifying end hosts in different virtual networks. We propose a novel identity management framework (iMark) that enables end-to-end connectivity across heterogeneous virtual networks without revoking their autonomy. We describe the architectural and the functional components of iMark accompanied by the procedures that manipulate these components and validate it through numerical evaluation.;The virtual network embedding problem deals with the mapping of virtual nodes and links onto physical network resources. We argue that the separation of the node mapping and the link mapping phases in the existing algorithms considerably reduces the solution space and degrades embedding quality. We propose coordinated node and link mapping, based on a mathematical programming formulation, to devise two algorithms (D-ViNE and R-ViNE) for the online version of the problem under realistic assumptions. Extensive simulation experiments show that the proposed algorithms significantly outperform the existing heuristics by increasing the acceptance ratio and the revenue while decreasing the cost incurred by the substrate network. |
