A HyperNet Architecture

Network virtualization is becoming a fundamental building block of future Internet architectures. By adding networking resources into the “cloud”, it is possible for users to rent virtual routers from the underlying network infrastructure, connect them with virtual channels to form a virtual network, and tailor the virtual network (e.g., load application-specific networking protocols, libraries and software stacks on to the virtual routers) to carry out a specific task. In addition, network virtualization technology allows such special-purpose virtual networks to co-exist on the same set of network infrastructure without interfering with each other. Although the underlying network resources needed to support virtualized networks are rapidly becoming available, constructing a virtual network from the ground up and using the network is a challenging and labor-intensive task, one best left to experts. To tackle this problem, we introduce the concept of a HyperNet, a pre-built, pre-configured network package that a user can easily deploy or access a virtual network to carry out a specific task (e.g., multicast video conferencing). HyperNets package together the network topology configuration, software, and network services needed to create and deploy a custom virtual network. Users download HyperNets from HyperNet repositories and then “run” them on virtualized network infrastructure much like users download and run virtual appliances on a virtual machine. To support the HyperNet abstraction, we created a Network Hypervisor service that provides a set of APIs that can be called to create a virtual network with certain characteristics. To evaluate the HyperNet architecture, we implemented several example Hyper-Nets and ran them on our prototype implementation of the Network Hypervisor. Our experiments show that the Hypervisor API can be used to compose almost any special-purpose network – networks capable of carrying out functions that the current Internet does not provide. Moreover, the design of our HyperNet architecture is highly extensible, enabling developers to write high-level libraries (using the Network Hypervisor APIs) to achieve complicated tasks