Wireless network virtualization for enhancing security: Status, challenges and perspectives

Virtualization is emerging as an efficient resource utilization method that eliminates dedicated physical devices. Virtualization has been widely used in computer systems such as virtual memory, virtual storage access network and wired networks - and most recently in cloud computing - to enhance the network performance, resource utilization and energy efficiency, and to achieve performance isolation between different parties. Inspired by this, several techniques for network and wireless virtualization have been proposed in the literature in order to improve the network performance and security. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive study of network and wireless virtualization for enhancing overall network security. We also outline current state of the research and future perspectives. With this paper, readers can have a more thorough understanding of wireless virtualization for network security and the research trends in this area.