Network Virtualization: A step closer for seamless resource mobility

Network Virtualization has gained prominent attention in the recent years, not only from the academia, but also from the Industry, mainly due to its numerous features such as flexibility, programmability, elasticity and dynamicity. One of the key assets with Network Virtualization is the ability to move components of the virtual network, or even the entire virtual network, from one or several physical hosts to others in real-time and seamlessly to the end-users. This paper addresses virtual resource mobility from a new perspective: it proposes Virtual Network (VN) Clone migration, which requires no assumptions regarding the protocols running inside the virtual networks or its own architectures, leaving space for different types of protocols and architectures to be implemented, tested and used in production scenarios. The results are very promising: the VN Clone migration achieves no VN downtimes and it takes just a few seconds to be fully performed. This makes the VN Clone approach suitable both for non-real time traffic and voice over IP communications.