NetShare: Virtualizing Bandwidth Within the Cloud

The authors present NetShare, a way of dividing a network into slices, such that that each network slice has the illusion of a network all to itself with guaranteed bandwidth. Bandwidth unused by a network slice can also be shared proportionately among active network slices. NetShare extends fair queuing of links to fair sharing of networks. NetShare's virtualization of bandwidth complements existing technologies for virtualizing computation (as in VMWare) and storage (as in Amazon's S3). Together they allow organizations to rent or internally maintain multiple "Virtual Clouds" on the same physical infrastructure.