Location-aware dynamic network provisioning

Abstract

With the wide development of network services and the increasing network quality of service (QoS) requirements, dynamic network provisioning, which offers a smart way to segment the network to support particular services, becomes an important problem. Past studies of dynamic network provisioning mostly consider dynamic bandwidth and delay assignment in order to maximize the system throughput and minimize communication overhead. These studies leveraged Software Defined Network (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) to create dedicated end-to-end virtual networks which are called network slices. But, these works are lack of consideration of provisioning a dynamic network based on request locations where users would use the network to deploy their services. In this paper, a method for generating a network slice dynamically based on requested locations of users is proposed to support the location-aware dynamic network provisioning. The requested locations are obtained by users through a web interface, then the requested locations are encapsulated and sent to SDN controller which knows the geographical location of SDN switches. Then SDN controller sets up a location-aware network slice. To provide a viability of the proposed approach, we implemented the web interface and the protocol to share the requested locations.