Enhanced Network Support for Federated Cloud Infrastructures

This article addresses the need for a new dedicated bandwidth paradigm that allows flexible orchestration of resources from different sites (for example, a manufacturing organization and its upstream and downstream vendors) joining a cloud without belonging to the same administrative domain (that is, it supports cross-domain operations and advanced network support). The main design goal is to turn the network communication capabilities into virtualized resources that can be scheduled in conjunction with more traditional cloud resources and managed by a specific software layer within the federated (manufacturing) cloud system services to implement a service plane for use by cloud applications and resource-management services.