Virtual Link Resource Allocation in Federated Multi-Administrative Networks

A federated network can be seen as a collection of network domains, typically under different authorities, who collaborate and share network resources to enable the provision of end-to-end multi-domain services with possibly performance guarantees. To provide these services, domains need to disclose a compact portrayal of their topology. The interconnection of all exposed abstracted topologies serves as input to compute the appropriate paths that are needed to support an end-to-end service. Domains basically resort to a topology abstraction that reduces to a mesh of abstract links that connect to their border nodes. Such an abstraction voluntarily limits the information disclosed to other domains, but, on the other hand, leads to inefficient resource usage. In order to enable effective collaborations between domains, in this paper, we propose to enrich the topology aggregation exposed by domains by including additional abstract topology constructs, e.g. abstract non-border nodes, domain-level slices, etc. We then revisit the virtual link embedding problem to include the proposed aggregation. Our evaluations on real and random topologies show significant gains in terms of admission ratios and resource usage.