A framework to describe and search for virtual resource objects

Abstract

This paper presents a preliminary work on the development of a metalist-based description framework to efficiently describe and search for virtualized network resources for virtual network provisioning. Virtual resources are perceived as objects that can be described using metadata and semantically searched according to a set of criteria. The virtual resource objects are described by Infrastructure Providers that should advertise and offer their virtual resource descriptions to virtual network providers. These virtual network providers discover and match user queries for VNs with the virtual resources offered by the infrastructure providers. This work introduces the concept of metalist which is a simple and efficient way to specify sets of metadata for objects and explores how it is used to efficiently support virtual resource description. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.