Khalid Mengal: Virtualization in the Future Internet

Many parts of the Internet architecture were developed almost 30 years ago. During these 30 years a lot of new networking technologies and services have been developed and emerged, which were not there in the early stage of the Internet design. The research race to invent the Future Internet has already started and a significant number of research initiatives around the globe are already focusing in this regard. 4WARD, a European project in the 7th Framework Program, aims to address the challenges of the Future Internet through a set of radical architectural approaches built on the mobile and wireless background. It is foreseen that Network Virtualization will have an important role in the design of Future Internet. Interoperability among virtual networks of different architecture is a crucial issue. Thus, 4WARD Project proposes a concept called “Folding Point” that enables the intercommunication among multiple virtual networks possibly with different architectures.
The objective of the presented work is to design and implement a testbed facility that enables a feasibility study for the Folding Point concept. During this work first Folding Point prototype was designed and implemented on an experimental testbed. The designed Folding Point enables interoperability among IPv4 and IPv6 virtual networks, and in principle the same concept can be applied to interconnect any other type of virtual networks. This work also includes a state of the art analysis of various virtualization-based solutions for the design of the Future Internet. During this project work, different scenarios of the testbed have been setup to compare the performance of the Folding Point. The results reveal that the Folding Point can be used in different scenarios with an acceptable performance.

Presentation Slides