Position Paper: Secure Virtual Network Embedding

Abstract

Network virtualization has been recognized as an important technique to overcome the perceived ossification of the current Internet. Several variations of network virtualization have already been discussed in the literature. These approaches use virtualization to partition and/or combine physical network resources into virtual network resources. An actual deployment of virtual networks then requires the network operator to perform a mapping of virtual resources onto physical resources. The question of how this mapping can be performed in an optimal way is commonly known as the Virtual Network Embedding (VNE) problem. Several algorithms to solve this problem have been proposed already. These algorithms, however, focus on optimizing the use of resources with regard to performance. Security constraints to the VNE problem have not been investigated in depth, so far.