Virtualization and new generation network design

The current Internet is resistant to any significant change in its fundamental design, although it has successfully incorporated small incremental changes due to strong push from newer technologies and applications. Thus, due to this slow paced, uncoordinated and limited scale evolutionary changes, several projects around the world have adopted a more radical, clean slate approach to construct the future networks from scratch. In between the tug of interests of various players, network virtualization has been propounded as one of the most important attributes of the future inter-networking paradigms. Its key idea is to allow cohabitation of heterogeneous services and networks on shared physical resources, i.e. clean slate based networks or hidden redundancy in the existing Internet. This paper attempts to present a birds eye view of basic concepts, models and requirements for virtualization in the new generation networks. We support the idea that both the current Internet and networks based on clean slate approaches should work in parallel, while both supporting Virtualization on IP as a indispensable tool to provide diverse, adaptable, robust, secure and easily manageable future networks.