PVNs: Making virtualized network infrastructure usable

Network virtualization is becoming a fundamental building block of future Internet architectures. Although the underlying network infrastructure needed to dynamically create and deploy custom virtual networks is rapidly taking shape ( e.g., GENI), constructing and using a virtual network is still a challenging and labor intensive task, one best left to experts. In this paper, we present the concept of a Packaged Virtual Network (PVN), that enables normal users to easily download, deploy and use application-specific virtual networks. At the heart of our approach is a PVN Hypervisor that “runs” a PVN by allocating the virtual network resources needed by the PVN and then connecting the PVN's participants into the network on demand. To demonstrate our PVN approach, we implemented a multicast PVN that runs on the PVN hypervisor prototype using ProtoGENI as the underlying virtual network, allowing average users to create their own private multicast network.