The Internet is one of the great technology success stories of the twentieth century. It has enabled greater access to information, provided new modes of communication among people and organizations and has fundamentally changed the way we work, play and learn. Unfortunately, the Internet's very success is now creating obstacles to innovation in the networking technology that lies at its core and the services that use it. The size and scope of the public Internet now make the introduction and deployment of new network technologies and advanced services difficult. While the research community has developed innovative solutions to a wide range of networking challenges, there has been remarkably little progress towards deploying these capabilities in the Internet at large. Even the deployment of relatively modest changes of widely acknowledged importance, such as IPv6, have proved quite difficult. The current Internet architecture and the business relationships that have developed among the various stakeholders have become a serious obstacle to its continuing evolution and growth.

The ossification of the Internet is a natural evolutionary stage in the development of any highly successful technology. Success creates constituencies with a stake in the status quo, and this in turn creates inertia that inhibits change. However, the problem is more acute in the context of network technologies because, network technologies are shielded from effective competition by the deployment obstacles raised by the high cost of infrastructure and the need for agreement among a large collection of organizations with often competing interests. If we are to free the global communications infrastructure from stagnation, we must find a way to enable new technologies to be deployed and used, at least on an experimental basis. Deployment must be carried out on a large enough scale to demonstrate the utility of new technologies to a broad audience and enable meaningful evaluation.

Network virtualization provides a potential strategy for addressing the ossification of the Internet. In a virtualized network, multiple virtual networks co-exist on top of a shared substrate. Different virtual networks provide alternate end-to-end packet delivery systems and may use different protocols and packet formats. Virtual networks are implemented by virtual routers, connected by virtual links.

Virtualized overlay networks have already become an important tool for the research community [PlanetLab], but virtualization also has the potential to become a first-class feature of the core network. The emergence of high performance network processors and advances in configurable logic device now make it feasible to build virtualized routers that can match the performance of conventional routers, while allowing far greater flexiblity.

This web site is part of an effort to start a dialog within the networking research community on how network virtualization can be used to address the problem of Internet ossification. It has been organized by Tom Anderson, Larry Peterson, Scott Shenker and Jon Turner, with support from the National Science Foundation. The objective of this effort is to build a consensus within the research community, leading to recommendations to NSF for a major new initiative in network virtualization. As part of this effort, a workshop was held at Washington University in January 2005 to discuss the key issues and formulate recommendations to the National Science Foundation. The conclusions of the workshop can be found in the workshop report.

The networking research community is invited to become a part of this dialog by joining the network virtualization mailing list and sending longer contributions (white papers, presentation slides, links to related sites) to the web site coordinator (Jon Turner) who will post them in the papers & slides section of the site.