Abstract

The Internet has received a phenomenal success over the past few decades. However, the increasing demands on the Internet usage and the rapid evolution of the applications and services provided over the Internet have demonstrated that the current Internet architecture is unsuitable for supporting many types of applications. Moreover, its ubiquity and multi-provider nature make nearly impossible the introduction of radical changes or improvements without coordination and consensus between many providers. Thus, any technological changes in the current Internet architecture could result in unintended consequences on the overall Internet usage.
Network virtualization is considered as promising, yet challenging, solution to overcome these limitations. It commonly refers to the creation of several isolated logical networks that can coexist on the same shared physical network infrastructures. Its key concept is to enable several network architectures to run concurrently in a multi-role-oriented environment in which the role of the traditional Internet Service Provider (ISP) is decoupled into several roles such as infrastructure provider (InP), virtual network provider (VNP) and service provider (SP). Despite the promising benefits, this concept is associated with many challenges. These, among others, include the description and publication as well as discovery of resources on which virtual networks are deployed.
In this thesis, we define a broker-based architecture that provides functions for publishing, discovering and negotiating as well as instantiating and managing resources in network virtualization environment. We proposed an information model that assists various providers in describing the resources and services they offer and we implemented a proof of concept prototype to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed architecture. Moreover, we have conducted extensive experiments to evaluate the performance and the scalability of the implemented system.