What is VINEA?

VINEA means vineyard in latin, but it is also an acronym of VIrtual Network Embedding Architecture. The VINEA architecture prototype enables users to convert high-level policies into low-level virtual network embedding rules.

Abstract

Network virtualization is a technology that enables multiple virtual instances to coexist on a common physical network infrastructure. This paradigm fostered new business models, allowing infrastructure providers to lease or share their physical resources. Each virtual network is isolated and can be customized to support a new class of customers and applications. To this end, infrastructure providers need to embed virtual networks on their infrastructure. The virtual network embedding is the (NP-hard) problem of matching constrained virtual networks onto a physical network. Heuristics to solve the embedding problem have exploited several policies under different settings. For example, centralized solutions have been devised for small enterprise physical networks, while distributed solutions have been proposed over larger federated wide-area networks. In this thesis we present a policy-based architecture for the virtual network embedding problem. By policy, we mean a variant aspect of any of the three (invariant) embedding mechanisms: physical resource discovery, virtual network mapping, and allocation on the physical infrastructure. Our architecture adapts to different scenarios by instantiating appropriate policies, and has bounds on embedding efficiency, and on convergence embedding time, over a single provider, or across multiple federated providers. The performance of representative novel and existing policy configuration are compared via extensive simulations, and over a prototype implementation. We also present an object model as a foundation for a protocol specification, and we release a testbed to enable users to test their own embedding policies, and to run applications within their virtual networks. The testbed uses a Linux system architecture to reserve virtual node and link capacities.

Publications

Flavio Esposito.
A Policy-based Architecture for Virtual Network Embedding.
(PhD Thesis), October 20, 2013. [PDF][PS][Abstract]
Flavio Esposito, I. Matta and Y. Wang.
VINEA: An Architecture for Virtual Network Embedding Policy Programmability.
In: IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS). Vol PP, Issue 99, Feb. 2016. [PDF]
Flavio Esposito and Ibrahim Matta.
A Decomposition-Based Architecture for Distributed Virtual Network Embedding.
ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Distributed Cloud Computing (DCC 2014)
Co-located with ACM SIGCOMM 2014, Chicago, USA, August 18, 2014. [arxiv] [PDF]
Flavio Esposito, Donato Di Paola and Ibrahim Matta.
On Distributed Virtual Network Embedding with Guarantees.
In IEEE/ACM Transactions of Networking, Vol. 24. Issue 1, Pages 569-582. Dec 2014. [PDF]
Flavio Esposito, Yuefeng Wang, Ibrahim Matta and John Day.
Dynamic Layer Instantiation as a Service.
Demo at USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 2013).
Lombard, IL, April 2-5, 2013. [PDF]
Flavio Esposito, Donato Di Paola and Ibrahim Matta.
A General Distributed Approach to Slice Embedding with Guarantees.
IFIP Networking 2013 Conference, Brooklyn, NY, USA, May 22-24, 2013. [PDF]
IFIP One Minute Madness Award.
Flavio Esposito, Ibrahim Matta and Vatche Ishakian.
Slice Embedding Solutions for Distributed Service Architectures.
ACM Computing Surveys, Accepted Nov 2012 (to appear in Vol. 46 Issue 1, March 2014)
[Technical Report BUCS-TR-2011-025]

Code

The VINEA prototype can be forked from [this] github repository.