A Hierarchical Management Architecture for Virtual Network Mapping

Network Virtualization is a promising way to deploy future network architectures supporting diverse virtual networks sharing the substrate network. But the increased flexibility poses a daunting challenge to the management and control of the virtual resources to ensure efficient resource utilization and QoS guarantee. In this paper, we propose an architecture based on a hierarchical and multi-domain management mechanism that allows for separate Management Elements responsible for the corresponding domain's resource assignment individually and executing virtual network embedding in parallel. The hierarchical management framework reduces the complexity, improves the efficiency and satisfies the real-time requirement of virtual network embedding to a shared substrate network.