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The new and emerging IT services require very high network capacities and specific IT resources that cannot be intrinsically delivered by the current Best Effort Internet. In response to this the European project GEYSERS (Generalised Architecture for Dynamic Infrastructure Services) is proposing a novel architecture that employs optical networking, capable of provisioning "Optical Network and IT resources" for end-to-end service delivery. GEYSERS adopts the Infrastructure as a Service framework and the Service-Oriented Networking paradigm and proposes an architecture that enables infrastructure operators to virtualize their infrastructures (optical network and IT resources) and offer them as a service based on the user/application requirements. This paper provides an overview of the GEYSERS approach regarding virtualization of infrastructures comprising optical network and IT resources. Special emphasis is given in the description of the Logical Composition Layer of the architecture that is responsible for both the creation and maintenance of virtual resources and the virtual infrastructures. An important function of the Logical Composition Layer is the virtual infrastructure planning process discussed in detail. An optimization scheme suitable to adaptively plan and re-plan virtual infrastructures employing evolutionary game theory is presented and compared to conventional centralized approaches. Our evolutionary game theory modelling results clearly indicate, that given sufficient time to learn the status of the underlying physical topology the virtual infrastructures planned have similar performance to those generated through traditional global optimization approaches such as integer linear programming.

Over the years, the Internet has become a central tool for society. The extent of its growth and usage raises critical issues associated with its design principles that need to be addressed before it reaches its limits. Many emerging applications have increasing requirements in terms of bandwidth, QoS and manageability. Moreover, applications such as Cloud computing and 3D-video streaming require optimization and combined provisioning of different infrastructure resources and services that include both network and IT resources. Demands become more and more sporadic and variable, making dynamic provisioning highly needed. As a huge energy consumer, the Internet also needs to be energy-conscious. Applications critical for society and business (e.g., health, finance) or for real-time communication demand a highly reliable, robust and secure Internet. Finally, the future Internet needs to support sustainable business models, in order to drive innovation, competition, and research. Combining optical network technology with Cloud technology is key to addressing the future Internet/Cloud challenges. In this context, we propose an integrated approach: realizing the convergence of the IT- and optical-network-provisioning models will help bring revenues to all the actors involved in the value chain. Premium advanced network and IT managed services integrated with the vanilla Internet will ensure a sustainable future Internet/Cloud enabling demanding and ubiquitous applications to coexist.

The European Integrated Project GEYSERS - Generalised Architecture for Dynamic Infrastructure Services - is concentrating on infrastructures incorporating integrated optical network and IT resources in support of the Future Internet with special emphasis on cloud computing. More specifically GEYSERS proposes the concept of Virtual Infrastructures over one or more interconnected Physical Infrastructures comprising both network and IT resources. Taking into consideration the energy consumption levels associated with the ICT today and the expansion of the Internet in size and complexity, that incurring increased energy consumption of both IT and network resources, energy efficient infrastructure design becomes critical. To address this need, in the framework of GEYSERS, we propose energy efficient design of infrastructures incorporating integrated optical network and IT resources, supporting resilient end-to-end services. Our modeling results quantify significant energy savings of the proposed solution by jointly optimizing the allocation of both network and IT resources.

GEYSERS aims at defining an end-to-end network architecture that offers a novel planning, provisioning and operational framework for optical network and IT infrastructure providers and operators. In this framework, physical infrastructure resources (network and IT) are dynamically partitioned to virtual resources and then composed into a Virtual Infrastructure offered to operators as a service. The operator will be able to operate a virtual infrastructure with an enhanced Network Control Plane (NCP) able to offer coupled, optimized and dynamic on-demand Network and IT provisioning services (i.e., interconnections between multiple IT resources and end-users). The scope and novelty of the GEYSERS architecture is focused on the functional definition and description of two innovative layers, the enhanced Network Control Plane (NCP) and the Logical Infrastructure Composition Layer (LICL). The Service Middleware Layer (SML) and the physical layer (PHY) are part of the overall GEYSERS architecture but are based on existing developments that will be appropriately adapted or extended.