A distributed approach for virtual network discovery

The ever-increasing requirements for performance, flexibility, and robustness are imposing a severe strain on the Internet's stagnated architecture. Network virtualization arises as a potential solution for improving the current situation by letting multiple networks with different requirements, architectures and protocols to coexist and share the same infrastructure in an independent way. These advantages are of great interest for network operators. This paper presents a virtualization platform that enables the creation, discovery, monitoring and management of virtual networks. It then concentrates on the proposal of a distributed discovery algorithm that is able to discover both physical and virtual network topologies. This algorithm uses the concepts of level 2 multicast and spanning tree to decrease the overhead related to the exchange of discovery messages between the nodes. The simulation results show that, when compared to gossip based discovery algorithms, the performance of our approach is significantly increased, up to an improvement in exchanged messages of three orders of magnitude, when considering physical networks with 500 nodes. Experimental results have shown that distributed approaches also introduce significant improvements when compared with centralized approaches.