Network virtualization and slicing technologies create opportunity for infrastructure-less virtual network operators (VNOs) to enter the market anytime and provide diverse services. Multiple VNOs compete to provide the same kinds of services to end users (EUs). VNOs lease virtual resources from the infrastructure provider (InP) and sell services to the EUs by using the leased resources. The difference between the selling and leasing is the gross profit for the VNOs. A VNO that leases resources without precise knowledge of future demand, may not consume all the leased resources through service offers to EUs. Consequently, the VNO experiences loss and resources remain unused. In order to improve resource utilization and ensure that new entrant VNOs do not face losses, proper estimation of initial resource demand is important. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian game with Cournot oligopoly model to properly estimate the optimal initial resource demands for multiple entrant competing VNOs (players) with the objective of maximizing the expected profit for each VNO. The VNOs offer the same kinds of services to EUs with different qualities (player's type), which are public information. The exact service quality with which a VNO competes in the market is private information. Therefore, a VNO assumes the type of its opponent VNOs with certain probability. We derive the Bayesian Nash equilibrium (BNE) of the presented game and evaluate numerically the effect of service qualities and prices on the expected profit and market share of the VNOs.

Current network technologies, mainly represented by the Internet, have demonstrated little capacity to evolve because of the strict binding of communications to identifiers and locators. While locator namespaces represent the position of communication participants in the graph of a specific protocol, unstructured/plain identifiers represent the position of communications participants in the global network graph. Although they are valid for forwarding packets along communication paths, both views fail to fully represent the actual entities behind communications beyond a simple vertex. In this paper we introduce and evaluate an identity-based control plane that resolves these problems by abstracting communications from identifiers and locators and by using identities to achieve enhanced security, and mobility management operations. This identity-based control plane can then be integrated into different network architectures in order to incorporate the features it provides. This facilitates the evolution capacity of those architectures that separate the information transmission concerns (networking, routing), from end-to-end aspects like security and mobility management.

In this paper, we propose a method for automatic virtual resource allocation by using a multi-target classification-based scheme (MTCAS). In our method, an Infrastructure Provider (InP) bundles its CPU, memory, storage, and bandwidth resources as Network Elements (NEs) and categorizes them into several types in accordance to their function, capabilities, location, energy consumption, price, etc. MTCAS is used by the InP to optimally allocate a set of NEs to a Virtual Network Operator (VNO). Such NEs will be subject to some constraints, such as the avoidance of resource over-allocation and the satisfaction of multiple Quality of Service (QoS) metrics. In order to achieve a comparable or higher prediction accuracy by using less training time than the available ensemble-based multi-target classification (MTC) algorithms, we propose a majority-voting based ensemble algorithm (MVEN) for MTCAS. We numerically evaluate the performance of MTCAS by using the MVEN and available MTC algorithms with synthetic training datasets. The results indicate that the MVEN algorithm requires 70% less training time but achieves the same accuracy as the related ensemble based MTC algorithms. The results also demonstrate that increasing the amount of training data increases the efficacy ofMTCAS, thus reducing CPU and memory allocation by about 33% and 51%, respectively.

The use of IP addresses as host IDs and locators in the present day Internet protocols imposes constraints on designing efficient solutions for mobility, multihoming, renumbering, and security. To eliminate the constraints, different approaches of introducing ID/locator split into future network architectures have been discussed recently. HIMALIS is such an architecture, which uses distinct sets of values for identifiers and locators and allows the network layer to change locators without requiring the upper layers to change identifiers. One of the major challenges of HIMALIS is the design and implementation of a distributed ID-to-locator mapping database system to efficiently store, update and provide the up-to-date mapping data to the network elements. For this purpose, this paper discusses the application of the Domain Trusted Entity (DTE) infrastructure to the HIMALIS architecture. It provides a unified manner to get locators from high level identifiers (names) with enhanced security, privacy, and trust, while maintaining all capabilities and full compatibility with the previous DNR, HNR, and IDR infrastructures found in HIMALIS.