Network Virtualization: A Viable Path Towards the Future Internet

New technologies as well as new ways of using network services are rapidly changing the Internet's landscape. These developments will have far-reaching implications for the architecture of the networks of the future. However, the current Internet design is plagued with a number of fundamental limitations, which makes its use as the sole basis for the networking applications of the future questionable. We believe that the Future Internet must allow the co-existence of diverse network designs and paradigms, both new and old, to remain open to innovation and meet the challenges of the future. In this paper, we propose to use network virtualization, embedded in an architectural framework, to achieve this goal and to lay the foundation for the deployment of novel concepts such as content-centric networking.