Virtualizing Next-generation Programmable Networks: Techniques, Use Cases, and Promising Future Directions

For decades, network virtualization plays a crucial role in modern networks, e.g., 6G mobile networks: tenants construct arbitrary virtual networks on the same physical network. However, production networks are becoming programmable and need more ways of network configurations. So prior techniques like SDN hypervisors are deprecated since they cannot configure programmable networks. In response, a new category of network virtualization techniques has emerged recently to virtualize programmable networks, i.e., programmable network hypervisors (PNHs). This article first reviews this trend to comprehensively survey PNHs. To understand their benefits, we build a testbed with hardware switches and sophisticated topologies. Our testbed experiments stress-test hypervisors and demonstrate that they outperform prior works with higher acceptance ratios of virtual networks under large-scale scenarios and heavy loads. Finally, we highlight the open issues of these techniques to shed light on the future directions in this promising topic.