Innovations and upgrades in virtualized network architectures

Abstract

The difficulty of making changes to the internet architecture has spawned widespread interest in virtualized testbeds as a place to deploy new services. Despite the excitement, uncertainty surrounds the question of how technologies can bridge the gap from testbed to global availability. It is recognized that no amount of validation will spur today's ISPs to make architectural changes, so the testbed itself must somehow provide global availability. We investigate whether a virtualized architecture that is widely offered by commercial ISPs would support the adoption of new services or upgrades to the infrastructure, and whether ISPs would ever support such an architecture. According to our economic analysis, the answer depends critically on how money flows to network and service providers. If the virtualized network inherits the market structure prevalent on the internet today, which we call network-gatekeeper, investment levels are likely to be poor. On the other hand, we identify two superior market types, mix-and-match and service-gatekeeper, which can improve incentives to invest in services, and even in network upgrades. We discuss how these market types may be implemented.