Managing federations of virtualized infrastructures: A semantic-aware policy based approach

This paper presents our work toward organizing and managing various forms of federations of virtualized infrastructures. We adopt the Ponder2 policy framework and the SMC architecture as a powerful engineering approach, which we apply to semantic-aware management of federations of Future Internet (FI) virtualized infrastructures. To cater for context-awareness, we plan for a common information model, based on the Network Description Language (NDL), capturing a common set of abstractions of virtualized resources and services, nodes, routers and switches, custom network topologies with specific bandwidth demands, etc. To handle management of generic complex federated environments, we employ structural patterns to model federations as graphs, whose vertices represent SMCs and edges denote the type of relationship between them. We give an illustration of such structures corresponding to existing FI experimental platforms in the US and Europe and we provide examples containing inter-domain management responsibilities as missions. Finally, we propose to augment the Ponder2 framework with single & multi-domain resource provisioning capabilities, enabling efficient sharing of virtualized networked facilities among federation users.