After 633 days, reading few hundred papers, writing a few, watching 100+ movies, reading 30+ fictions, eating lots of food, and doing many other things, my Master’s is over :D . I successfully presented/defended my thesis on 21st Jan 2009, and my thesis committee have approved it without any changes (there were 3 typos :( ). To the best of my knowledge this is the first thesis on network virtualization after the recent reincarnation. Officially the thesis is available in UWSpace. You can also get it here along with the presentation slides. I would like to thank my two readers, Prof. Ashraf Aboulnaga and Prof. Johnny Wong, and specially my supervisor Prof. Raouf Boutaba, who had been a pillar a support throughout the process.

The thesis focuses on identity management and resource allocation through virtual network embedding in the network virtualization environment. Since both the projects have already been accepted in IM and INFOCOM respectively, it was comparatively easier to put together the thesis. An overview of the thesis is given below:

Due to the existence of multiple stakeholders with conflicting goals and policies, alterations to the existing Internet architecture are now limited to simple incremental updates; deployment of any new, radically different technology is next to impossible. To fend off this ossification, network virtualization has been propounded as a diversifying attribute of the future inter-networking paradigm. In this talk, we provide an overview of the network virtualization environment (NVE) and address two basic problems in this emerging field of networking research.

The identity management problem is primarily concerned with ensuring interoperability across heterogeneous identifier spaces for locating and identifying end hosts in different virtual networks. We describe the architectural and the functional components of a novel identity management framework (iMark) that enables end-to-end connectivity across heterogeneous virtual networks in the NVE without revoking their autonomy.

The virtual network embedding problem deals with the mapping of virtual nodes and links onto physical network resources. We argue that the separation of the node mapping and the link mapping phases in the existing algorithms considerably reduces the solution space and degrades embedding quality. We propose coordinated node and link mapping to devise two algorithms (D-ViNE and R-ViNE) for the online version of the problem under realistic assumptions and compare their performance with the existing heuristics.

Btw, you should listen to this wonderful song by Stevie Wonder.