Secure resource provisioning across multiple domains

Network resource provisioning is an important technique for infrastructure providers (infra-providers) because it enables them to utilize their facilities with high efficiency. However, to fully satisfy user requests it is probably necessary to use facilities across multiple domains, for which the conventional resource provisioning methods are unsuitable for the multiple domains because they require unrevealed information from infra-providers. The competitive relationships among infra-providers make it difficult for them to reveal their information to the infra-providers. In this paper, we propose a framework and method for resource provisioning across multiple domains that uses infra-providers' confidential information without exposing it to other infra-providers. To preserve the confidentiality of the infra-providers' information, we propose a cooperative framework using multiparty computation (MPC). However, although MPC provides confidentiality it also brings about nearly intractable computational overhead. Therefore, we pick out values that are locally commutable in each domain and essential for resource provisioning. By using MPC only for these values, our proposed method achieves both tractable MPC overhead and good quality provisioning while preserving information secrecy. Evaluation results show that the computational overhead is tractable and that the average utility fee is at least on the same level as that of the conventional methods.