| What
is this Project about? Interest in network virtualisation has been growing rapidly amongst research and industry communities in the last few years, fostered by the combination of several trends:
- Significant advances and increasing maturity of virtualisation technologies, namely operating system virtualisation, which paved way to the widespread deployment of virtualisation technologies in data centres;
- Emergence of “cloud-based” technologies (cloud computing, “Infrastructure as a Service”), enabling the delivery of computing resources as a service, in which virtualisation technologies typically play a key role;
- Quest for new Internet paradigms, freed from the limitations of IP; increasingly evident limitations of the traditional IP model to provide a future-proof solution to networking requirements and cope with the myriad of present and future Internet applications and services.
In the research domain, different network virtualisation
concepts are studied and first prototype implementations are available, e.g.
Openflow (http://www.openflowswitch.org/).
The combination of these aspects will potentially introduce
major changes to how networks are deployed, managed and operated. In addition, it can impose disruptive changes in the telecoms’
traditional business model.
From network operators’ perspective, the potential benefits
of network virtualisation are multifold and can be explored in multiple
dimensions:
- Minimizing the cost of network
ownership by sharing infrastructure;
- Generating new revenues by
reselling infrastructure to third parties or building new managed services;
- Improving agility by facilitating
the rapid deployment of new network technologies;
- Enabling virtual presence of
operators in remote geographic locations with no need of heavy investments in
network infrastructure;
- Isolation of network resources
sharing a common infrastructure, ensuring the coexistence of production and
testing environments.
- Enabling smooth technology
migration (e.g. IPv4/IPv6).
Perhaps most important of all, network virtualisation enables
technological diversity rather than the “one-size-fits-all” approach advocated
by IP convergence (or ATM convergence, in the past), while at the same time
taking advantage of the economies enabled by running and maintaining a single
network infrastructure.
On the other hand, by effectively decoupling services from
infrastructure, network virtualisation paves the way to disruptive changes in
the traditional business models and to the emergence of new business roles.
In
the last few years, significant research activities have been launched
in the area of network virtualisation. In Europe, in the framework of
FP7, projects such as 4WARD, Reservoir and Federica have focused in some
way on network virtualisation issues. In the US, GENI, CABO and VINI
initiatives have been active in this area, as well. However, these
initiatives have focused mainly on architectural frameworks and on the
exploration of virtualisation as a key tool to enable future Internet
architectures. An operator-centric evaluation of virtualisation and a
roadmap for network virtualisation deployment by operators are still
largely missing.
Standardization in this field is at a very incipient stage. The “Focus
Group on Future Networks” was set up to collect and identify visions of
future networks. One of the deliverables to be produced by the Focus
Group will be a framework of network virtualisation. In addition, an
IRTF Network Virtualization Research Group is currently being setup,
with a draft charter under preparation.
In
summary, the full impact of the changes enabled by network
virtualisation has not been fully understood yet, but it is clear that
both opportunities and hurdles lie ahead for network operators. The
deployment of network virtualisation imposes new requirements and raises
new challenges in relation to how networks are provisioned, managed and
controlled today.
Focus and approach of the study
The
study shall:
-
Provide a survey on the state of the art
of network virtualisation, including vendor roadmaps, research
activities and standardization;
-
Collect requirements from an operator’s
point of view with regards to network virtualisation;
-
Identify opportunities for operators
offered by network virtualisation and explore scenarios based on
network virtualisation;
-
Identify major obstacles against
widespread adoption of network virtualisation in large scale
commercial scenarios;
-
Identify possible threats posed by
network virtualisation from the perspective of network operators,
particularly with regard to possible disruptive changes in
traditional business models;
-
Analyse the cross-impacts of network
virtualisation with other emerging trends, such as cloud computing
and IaaS;
-
Outline a roadmap for deployment of
network virtualisation;
-
Identify possible areas for
standardization;
-
Identify areas for further exploration
and research.
What are the main
objectives of this Project?
In
summary, the goals of this study are to:
-
Assess the real potential of network
virtualisation from a network operator perspective in the
short/medium term, namely as a tool for optimal service delivery and
a service rollout facilitator;
-
Evaluate network virtualisation in the
medium/long term, mainly as an enabler of technological diversity
and a migration tool to new Internet architectures and network
technologies;
-
Describe possible scenarios for network
virtualisation deployment, both in short and long term time scales;
-
Analyse new business roles and new business
models emerging from network virtualisation;
-
Evaluate interoperability issues and identify
areas requiring standardisation;
-
Outline a roadmap leading to the adoption of
network virtualisation by network operators.
Project participants:
- Deutsche Telekom
- Iceland Telecom
- Portugal Telecom
- Türk
Telekomünikasyon
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