Application-Aware End-to-End Virtualization Using a Named-Object Based Network Architecture

Network virtualization enables applications and users to access network resources in isolation on top of a shared infrastructure. Through their mechanisms, virtual networks support performance and security guarantees that would otherwise not be achievable if relying solely on existing network protocols. Unfortunately, due to the large variety of network protocols and architectures that populate today’s Internet, existing virtualization techniques have become disparate and different depending on the segment of the network they are deployed on. Thus, as no consolidation protocol exists, no solution is available to modern services and applications to coordinate the resources they employ to function. Due to the inefficiencies associated with overlay implementations they have to revert to, it becomes challenging for these services to meet strict application requirements, e.g., low latency.In this paper, we revisit years of identity based communications to propose an approach to integrate network virtualization techniques around a single framework: the named-object abstraction. The presented approach uses unique virtual network identifiers to describe and implement custom topologies and routing metrics and achieve desired QoS requirements. This technique enables the support of an integrated network virtualization with end-to-end application aware routing on top of the network infrastructure. A proof-of-concept implementation running on the ORBIT testbed confirms that the named-object architecture can achieve low VN processing and control overhead. The proposed solution achieves an average latency performance improvement of 60% in comparison to a baseline implementation without compute and network cross layer optimizations.