Towards information modeling for a QoS-aware support in the lifecycle of virtual networks

Information network modeling is nowadays a popular area of research. Especially, the introduction of virtualization technologies is changing the lifecycle of systems. Virtualization techniques allow distinguishing different levels: applications, networks, and equipment. The design of new virtual networks must consider the requirements of all these levels in a complementary fashion. Quality of Service (QoS) is still the one of the main key feature to be integrated. In this paper, we focus on the virtualized environments where we define a generic concept, called the VirtualElement. Indeed, we are interested in the representation of information enabling the automation of deployment, monitoring and management tasks for virtual networks. For this purpose we characterize the VirtualElement by constrains representing its functional and non-functional behavior. We apply our model at different phases of lifecycle of virtual networks by defining the service profiling. We propose a translation of the virtual network into an OVF file.