Network virtualization environments (NVEs) are emerging to meet the increasing diversity of demands by Internet users where a virtual network (VN) can be constructed to accommodate each specific application service. In the future Internet, diverse service providers (SPs) will provide application services on their own VNs running across diverse infrastructure providers (InPs) that provide physical resources in an NVE. To realize both efficient resource utilization and good QoS of each individual service in such environments, SPs should perform adaptive control on network and computational resources in dynamic and competitive resource sharing, instead of explicit and sufficient reservation of physical resources for their VNs. On the other hand, two novel concepts, software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV), have emerged to facilitate the efficient use of network and computational resources, flexible provisioning, network programmability, unified management, etc., which enable us to implement adaptive resource control. In this paper, therefore, we propose an architectural design of network orchestration for enabling SPs to maintain QoS of their applications aggressively by means of resource control on their VNs efficiently, by introducing virtual network provider (VNP) between InPs and SPs as 3-tier model, and by integrating SDN and NFV functionalities into NVE framework. We define new north-bound interfaces (NBIs) for resource requests, resource upgrades, resource programming, and alert notifications while using the standard OpenFlow interfaces for resource control on users' traffic flows. The feasibility of the proposed architecture is demonstrated through network experiments using a prototype implementation and a sample application service on nation-wide testbed networks, the JGN-X and RISE.

The window flow control based end-to-end TCP congestion control may cause unfair resource allocation among multiple TCP connections with different RTTs (round trip times) at a bottleneck link. In this paper, in order to improve this unfairness, we propose the active ECN which is an ECN based active queue mechanism (AQM). A bottleneck router with the proposed mechanism marks TCP segments with a probability which depends on the RTT of each connection. By enabling the TCP senders to reduce their transmission rate when their packets are marked, the proposed mechanism can realize the same transmission rate among TCP connections with different RTTs. Furthermore, the active ECN can directly mark ACKs from TCP receivers, while the conventional ECN marks TCP segments coming from the TCP senders. As a result, the queue length distribution at the bottleneck link gets stabilized, because the sender can quickly react to the marking according to variation of the queue length.

Generalized Multi-protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) technologies are expected a key technology that creates high-performance Internet backbone networks. There were many GMPLS interoperability trials. However, most of them reported the successful results only. How to set up a trial network and how to test it was generally not discussed. In this paper, as a kind of tutorial, detailed GMPLS field trials in the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) Kei-han-na Info-Communication Open Laboratory, Interoperability Working Group (WG) are reported. The interoperability WG is aiming at the leading edge GMPLS protocol based Inter-Carrier Interface that utilizes wide-bandwidth, cost-effective photonic technology to implement IP-centric managed networks. The interoperability WG is a consortium for researching the GMPLS protocol and advancing a de facto standard in this area. Its experimental results, new ideas, and protocols are submitted to standardization bodies such as the International Telecommunications Union-Telecommunication standardization sector (ITU-T), the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and the Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF). This paper introduces the activities of the interoperability WG; they include a nationwide GMPLS field trial using the JGN II network with multi-vendor, multi-switching-capable equipment and a GMPLS multi routing area trial that used a multi-vendor lambda-switching-capable network.

Motivated by the question of how to quickly transfer large files if multiple and heterogeneous networks are available but each has insufficient performance for a requested task, we propose a data transfer framework for integrating multiple and heterogeneous challenged access networks, in which long delays, heavy packet losses, and frequent disconnections are observed. An important feature of this framework is to transmit the control information separately from the transmission of data information, where they are flexibly transferred on different types of communication media (network paths) in different ways, and to provide a virtual single network path between the two nodes. We describe the design of the mechanisms of this framework such as the retransmission, the rate adjustment of each data flow, and the data-flow setup control. We validate a prototype implementation through two different experiments using terrestrial networks and a satellite communication system.