Les évolutions technologies mobiles majeures, tels que les réseaux mobiles 3G, HSPA+ et LTE, ont augmenté de façon significative la capacité des données véhiculées sur liaison radio. Alors que les avantages de ces évolutions sont évidents à l’usage, un fait moins connu est que ces améliorations portant principalement sur l’accès radio nécessitent aussi des avancées technologiques dans le réseau de collecte (backhaul) pour supporter cette augmentation de bande passante. Les fournisseurs d’accès Internet (FAI) et les opérateurs de réseau mobile doivent relever un réel défi pour accompagner l’usage des smartphones. Les coûts opérationnels associés aux méthodes traditionnelles de backhaul augmentent plus vite que les revenus générés par les nouveaux services de données. Ceci est particulièrement vrai lorsque le réseau backhaul doit lui-même être construit sur des liens radio. Un tel réseau de backhaul mobile nécessite (i) une gestion de qualité de service (QoS) liée au trafic avec des exigences strictes en matière de délai et de gigue, (ii) une haute disponibilité / fiabilité. Alors que la plupart des FAI et des opérateurs de réseau mobile font état des avantages de mécanismes de redondance et de résilience pour garantir une haute disponibilité, force est de constater que les réseaux actuels sont encore exposés à des indisponibilités. Bien que les causes de ces indisponibilités soient claires, les fluctuations rapides et / ou des pannes imprévues du trafic continuent d’affecter les plus grands opérateurs. Mais ces opérateurs ne pourraient-ils pas mettre en place des modèles et des mécanismes pour améliorer la survie des réseaux pour éviter de telles situations ? Les opérateurs de réseaux mobiles peuvent-ils mettre en place ensemble des solutions à faible coût qui assureraient la disponibilité et la fiabilité des réseaux ? Compte tenu de ce constat, cette thèse vise à : (i) fournir des solutions de backhaul à faible coût ; l’objectif est de construire des réseaux sans fil en ajoutant de nouvelles ressources à la demande plutôt que par sur-dimensionnements, en réponse à un trafic inattendu surgit ou à une défaillance du réseau, afin d’assurer une qualité supérieure de certains services (ii) fournir des communications sans interruption, y compris en cas de défaillance du réseau, mais sans redondance. Un léger focus porte sur l’occurrence de ce problème sur le lien appelé «dernier kilomètre» (last mile). Cette thèse conçoit une nouvelle architecture de réseaux backhaul mobiles et propose une modélisation pour améliorer la survie et la capacité de ces réseaux de manière efficace, sans reposer sur des mécanismes coûteux de redondance passive. Avec ces motivations, nous étudions le problème de partage de ressources d'un réseau de backhaul entre opérateurs concurrents, pour lesquelles un accord de niveau de service (SLA) a été conclu. Ainsi, nous présentons une étude systématique de solutions proposées portant sur une variété d’heuristiques de partage empiriques et d'optimisation des ressources. Dans ce contexte, nous poursuivons par une étude sur un mécanisme de recouvrement après panne qui assure efficacement et à faible coût la protection et la restauration de ressources, permettant aux opérateurs via une fonction basée sur la programmation par contraintes de choisir et établir de nouveaux chemins en fonction des modèles de trafic des clients finaux. Nous illustrons la capacité de survie des réseaux backhaul disposant d’un faible degré de redondance matérielle, par la gestion efficace d’équipements de réseau de backhaul répartis géographiquement et appartenant aux différents opérateurs, en s’appuyant sur des contrôleurs logiquement centralisés mais physiquement distribués, en respectant des contraintes strictes sur la disponibilité et la fiabilité du réseau / Revolutionary mobile technologies, such as high-speed packet access 3G (HSPA+) and LTE, have significantly increased mobile data rate over the radio link. While most of the world looks at this revolution as a blessing to their day-to-day life, a little-known fact is that these improvements over the radio access link results in demanding tremendous improvements in bandwidth on the backhaul network. Having said this, today’s Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) are intemperately impacted as a result of this excessive smartphone usage. The operational costs (OPEX) associated with traditional backhaul methods are rising faster than the revenue generated by the new data services. Building a mobile backhaul network is very different from building a commercial data network. A mobile backhaul network requires (i) QoS-based traffic with strict requirements on delay and jitter (ii) high availability/reliability. While most ISPs and MNOs have promised advantages of redundancy and resilience to guarantee high availability, there is still the specter of failure in today’s networks. The problems of network failures in today’s networks can be quickly but clearly ascertained. The underlying observation is that ISPs and MNOs are still exposed to rapid fluctuations and/or unpredicted breakdowns in traffic; it goes without saying that even the largest operators can be affected. But what if, these operators could now put in place designs and mechanisms to improve network survivability to avoid such occurrences? What if mobile network operators can come up with low-cost backhaul solutions together with ensuring the required availability and reliability in the networks? With this problem statement in-hand, the overarching theme of this dissertation is within the following scopes: (i) to provide low-cost backhaul solutions; the motivation here being able to build networks without over-provisioning and then to bring-in new resources (link capacity/bandwidth) on occasions of unexpected traffic surges as well as on network failure conditions for particularly ensuring premium services (ii) to provide uninterrupted communications even at times of network failure conditions, but without redundancy. Here a slightly greater emphasis is laid on tackling the ‘last-mile’ link failures. The scope of this dissertation is therefore to propose, design and model novel network architectures for improving effective network survivability and network capacity, at the same time by eliminating network-wide redundancy, adopted within the context of mobile backhaul networks. Motivated by this, we study the problem of how to share the available resources of a backhaul network among its competitors, with whom a Service Level Agreement (SLA) has been concluded. Thus, we present a systematic study of our proposed solutions focusing on a variety of empirical resource sharing heuristics and optimization frameworks. With this background, our work extends towards a novel fault restoration framework which can cost-effectively provide protection and restoration for the operators, enabling them with a parameterized objective function to choose desired paths based on traffic patterns of their end-customers. We then illustrate the survivability of backhaul networks with reduced amount of physical redundancy, by effectively managing geographically distributed backhaul network equipments which belong to different MNOs using ‘logically-centralized’ physically-distributed controllers, while meeting strict constraints on network availability and reliability

Software-Defined Wide Area Networks is a technology that has received a lot of attention in recent years. The technology enables direct Internet access without having to direct traffic through a data center. It also enables the use of less expensive Internet connections to build the Wide-Area Network, expensive Multiprotocol LabelSwitchingconnectionsarenolongernecessary. This results in greater responsibility for enterprises when it comes to ensuring performance within the network, where the previous dedicated links with a guaranteed performance by Internet Service Provider have been replaced with unpredictable best-effort connections. The project targets the challenges Software-Defined Wide Area Networks introduces in terms of monitoring, by examining the required network transparency between Wide-Area Network edges. A selection of Network Management Systems was evaluated with the requirements specification as a basis. The results show that more diligent monitoring at the edges is needed. Visibility into the underlay network, providing transportation, has to be available. Where the enterprises need to be able to examine path-selection of traffic per application. To ensure that the root of problems can be located in case of performance issues. This was not obtained by the evaluated Network Management Systems. Moreover, it turned out that there was no common standard available for monitoring the technology at the time of the project. The lack of knowledge in the field aimed to decrease with the degree project and the result is of greatest interest to companies that have made the transition to Software-Defined Wide Area Networks or are about to do so. / Software-Defined Wide Area Networks är en teknik som har fått mycket uppmärksamhet de senaste åren. Tekniken möjliggör direkt internetåtkomst utan att behöva dirigera trafik genom datacentret. Det möjliggör också användningavbilligareinternetanslutningar för att bygga Wide-AreaNetwork, dyra Multiprotocol Label Switching anslutningar är inte längre nödvändiga. Detta resulterar i ett större ansvar för företag när det gäller att säkerställa prestanda inom nätverket, där de tidigare dedikerade länkarna med garanterad prestanda av internetleverantörer har ersatts med oförutsägbara anslutningar som skickar trafik efter bästa förmåga. Examensarbetet riktar sig mot de utmaningar som Software-Defined Wide Area Networks innebär när det gäller övervakning, genom att undersöka den nödvändiga nätverkstransparensen mellan Wide-Area Network kanterna. Ett urval av nätverkshanteringssystem utvärderades med en definierad kravspecifikation som grund. Resultaten visar att det behövs mer noggrann övervakning i Wide-Area Network kanterna. Insyn i transportlagret måste vara tillgänglig och företagen behöver kunna granska vägval av trafik per applikation, för att säkerställa att ursprungsfel går att lokaliseras i händelse av prestandaproblem. Detta erhölls inte av de utvärderade nätverkshanteringssystemen. Det visade sig dessutom att det inte fanns någon gemensam standard tillgänglig för övervakning av tekniken vid tidpunkten för examensarbetet. Examensarbetet syftar till att minska kunskapsbristen inom området och resultatet är av störst intresse för företag som gjort övergången till Software-Defined Wide Area Networks eller är på väg att göra det.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a network architecture that differs from traditionalnetwork planes. SDN has tree layers: infrastructure, controller, and application. Thegoal of SDN is to simplify management of larger networks by centralizing control into thecontroller layer instead of having it in the infrastructure. Given the known advantages ofSDN networks, and the flexibility of cloud computing. We are interested if this combinationof SDN and cloud services affects network performance, and what affect the cloud providersphysical location have on the network performance. These points are important whenSDN becomes more popular in enterprise networks. This seems like a logical next step inSDN, centralizing branch networks into one cloud-based SDN controller. These questionswere created with a literature studies and answered with an experimentation method. Theexperiments consist of two network topologies both locally hosted SDN (baseline) and cloudhosted SDN. The topology used Zodiac FX switches and Linux hosts. The following metricswas measured: throughput, latency, jitter, packet loss, and time to add new hosts. Theconclusion is that SDN as a cloud service is possible and does not significantly affect networkperformance. One limitation with this thesis was the hardware, resulting in big fluctuationin throughput and packet loss.

The concept of Software Defined Networking (SDN) may be a way to face the fast growing computer network infrastructure with its demands and requirements. The concept is attracting the interest of enterprises to expand their respective network infrastructures, but one has to consider the impacts of migrating from an existing network infrastructure to an SDN network. One way that could minimize the impacts is to proceed a soft migration from a traditional IP network to SDN, creating what is so called a heterogeneous network. Instead of fully replacing the network infrastructure and face the impacts of it, the idea of the soft migration is to replace a part of it with an environment of SDN and examine the performance of it. This thesis work will analyze the performance of a network consisting of a traditional IP network combined with SDN. It is essential during this work to identify the differences in performance when having a heterogeneous network in comparison with having a dedicated traditional IP network. Therefore, the questions that will be addressed during this thesis work is to examine how such a heterogeneous network can be designed and measure the performance of it in terms of throughput, jitter and packet losses. By the method of experimentation and the studying of related works of the SDN fundamentals, we hope to achieve our goals with this thesis work, to give us and the reader a clearer insight.

Bien qu'Internet soit considéré comme le grand succès de ces dernières années, il est devenu une infrastructure critique à cause de l'absence de changements dans le réseau cœur et de la rigidité des équipements déployés. La mise en place et le déploiement des nouveaux services réseau sont devenus difficiles et coûteux. La virtualisation des réseaux a été présentée comme un nouveau paradigme pour palier aux problèmes de l’architecture actuelle de l'Internet. Dans ce travail de thèse, nous présentons la virtualisation des réseaux et les réseaux définis par logiciels (SDN) comme solution avec laquelle les fournisseurs de services peuvent offrir, au travers des réseaux virtuels (VN), des nouveaux services aux utilisateurs avec une meilleure qualité de service, tout en optimisant l'utilisation des ressources réseaux physiques. La première contribution consiste à démontrer le potentiel de SDN dans la gestion de la QoS dans le contexte d’un réseau domestique virtualisé. Nous proposons et implémentons le mécanisme ''FlowQoS'' qui peut être déployé par un fournisseur d’accès Internet au niveau de la boucle locale ou bien dans la passerelle domestique. Les mesures des performances montrent que cette solution permet de partager la bande passante entre plusieurs applications selon la configuration définie par l’utilisateur pour garantir la QoS pour chaque trafic actif. La seconde contribution est une modélisation, par la théorie des jeux, de l’interaction entre les fournisseurs de services et les fournisseurs de l’infrastructure pour le partage dynamique de l’infrastructure physique entre plusieurs VN avec différents besoins en QoS. Il s'agit d'un ensemble de jeux non-coopératifs pour modéliser la phase de négociation et celle de l’allocation dynamique des nœuds et des liens physiques pour chaque VN déployé. La troisième contribution porte sur une approche prédictive qui permet d’offrir un contrôle adaptatif de l’allocation de bande passante dans le but de réduire les délais des paquets d'un VN sur chaque lien physique. Ces deux dernières contributions offrent des modèles de partage dynamique des ressources d’une infrastructure physique tout en garantissant la QoS pour chaque VN / Internet has been successful in the recent years. The critical infrastructure of the internet has become stagnant due to the absence of changes in the core networks and stiffness of deployed equipment. It has become difficult and expensive to deploy new network services. Network virtualization is a new paradigm to overcome this problem. In this thesis, we present network virtualization and Software Defined Networking (SDN) as a solution that can be used by service providers. It enables them to provide new services to users through virtual networks (VNs) with better quality of service while optimizing the use of physical network resources. Firstly, we demonstrate the potential of SDN in the QoS management ofa virtualized home network (VN). We propose and implement ''FlowQoS'', a mechanism that can be deployed by an Internet Service Provider in the last-mile hop or in the home gateway. Performance measurements show that this solution can share bandwidth between applications according to user-defined configuration to guarantee QoS for each active traffic. The second contribution is modeling the interaction between service providers and infrastructure providers using game theoretic framework to offer dynamic sharing of physical infrastructure across multiple VN with different QoS requirements. We present a set of non-cooperative games to model the negotiation phase and the dynamic allocation of nodes and physical links for each deployed VN. Finally we focus on a predictive approach that allows an adaptive control of bandwidth allocation in order to reduce the packet delays for a given VN on each physical link. The last two contributions offer dynamic sharing models of physical infrastructure resources while guaranteeing the QoS for each VN

Software Defined Networking (SDN) provides centralized control by separating the control plane from the data plane on network devices. Subareas of networking such as Quality of Service (QoS) can greatly benefit from this separation as QoS policies can be provided globally for the network. One way of providing QoS is to reserve and monitor network resources to guarantee a specific data rate for a requested transmission end-to-end. The presented thesis looks into possible ways of controlling the wireless medium using SDN to provide QoS. A method for providing QoS in a multihop SDN network supporting wired and wireless communication was implemented. The method was evaluated using network performance metrics such as throughput and packet jitter. The results of the experiments showed that the implemented method could limit bandwidth utilization and prioritize bandwidth usage for higher priority nodes. The performance of the network was concluded to have severe issues with dropped packets and irregular packet jitter spikes.

<div>This thesis firstly surveys and summarizes the state-of-the-art studies from two research areas in Software Defined Networking (SDN) architecture: (i) control plane scalability and (ii) Quality of Service (QoS)-related problems. It also outlines the potential challenges and open problems that need to be addressed further for more scalable SDN control planes and better and complete QoS abilities in SDN networks. The thesis secondly presents a hierarchical SDN design along with an inter-AS QoS-guaranteed routing approach. This design addresses the scalability problems of control plane and privacy concerns of inter-AS QoS routing philosophies in SDN. After exploring the roots of control plane scalability problems in SDN, the thesis then proposes a metric to quantitatively evaluate the control plane scalability in SDN. Later, the thesis presents a general framework for economic analysis of network architectures and designs. To this end, the thesis defines and utilizes two metrics, Unit Service Cost Scalability and Cost-to-Service, to evaluate how SDN architecture performs compared to MPLS architecture in terms of unit cost for a service and cost of introducing a new service along with giving mathematical models to calculate Capital Expenditures (CAPEX) and Operational Expenditures (OPEX) of a network. Moreover, the thesis studies the problem of optimal final pricing for services by proposing an optimal pricing scheme for a service request with QoS in SDN environment while aiming to maximize benefits of both service providers and customers. Finally, the thesis investigates how programmable network architectures, i.e. SDN, affect the network economics compared to traditional network architectures, i.e. MPLS, in case of failures along with exploring the economic impact of failures in different SDN control plane models. </div>

Software-defined Networking (SDN) enables flexible network management, but as networks evolve to a large number of end-points with diverse network policies, higher speed, and higher utilization, abstraction of networks by SDN makes monitoring and debugging network problems increasingly harder and challenging. While some problems impact packet processing in the data plane (e.g., congestion), some cause policy deployment failures (e.g., hardware bugs); both create inconsistency between operator intent and actual network behavior. Existing debugging tools are not sufficient to accurately detect, localize, and understand the root cause of problems observed in a large-scale networks; either they lack in-network resources (compute, memory, or/and network bandwidth) or take long time for debugging network problems. This thesis presents three debugging tools: PathDump, SwitchPointer, and Scout, and a technique for tracing packet trajectories called CherryPick. We call for a different approach to network monitoring and debugging: in contrast to implementing debugging functionality entirely in-network, we should carefully partition the debugging tasks between end-hosts and network elements. Towards this direction, we present CherryPick, PathDump, and SwitchPointer. The core of CherryPick is to cherry-pick the links that are key to representing an end-to-end path of a packet, and to embed picked linkIDs into its header on its way to destination. PathDump is an end-host based network debugger based on tracing packet trajectories, and exploits resources at the end-hosts to implement various monitoring and debugging functionalities. PathDump currently runs over a real network comprising only of commodity hardware, and yet, can support surprisingly a large class of network debugging problems with minimal in-network functionality. The key contributions of SwitchPointer is to efficiently provide network visibility to end-host based network debuggers like PathDump by using switch memory as a "directory service" - each switch, rather than storing telemetry data necessary for debugging functionalities, stores pointers to end hosts where relevant telemetry data is stored. The key design choice of thinking about memory as a directory service allows to solve performance problems that were hard or infeasible with existing designs. Finally, we present and solve a network policy fault localization problem that arises in operating policy management frameworks for a production network. We develop Scout, a fully-automated system that localizes faults in a large scale policy deployment and further pin-points the physical-level failures which are most likely cause for observed faults.

Drastic growth and chaotic deployment of Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) in dense urban areas are some of the common issues of many Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Wi-Fi users. These issues result in a substantial reduction of the throughput and impede the balanced distribution of bandwidth among the users. Most of these networks are using unmanaged consumer-grade Access Points (APs) and there is no cooperation among them. Moreover, the conventional association mechanism that selects APs with the strongest Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) aggravates this situation. In spite of all these challenges, there is a great opportunity to build cooperative overlay networks among the APs that are owned by different ISPs, companies or individuals in dense urban areas. In fact, ISPs can distribute the resources among their customers in a cooperative fashion using a shared overlay platform which is constructed on top of the existing infrastructures. This approach helps the ISPs with efficient utilization of their resources and promoting the Quality of their Services (QoS). For instance, cooperative association control among the APs of different ISPs enables them to alleviate the drastic impact of interference in populated areas and improves the network throughput. Indeed, all Wi-Fi customers can associate to the APs from different ISPs and it leads to the construction of a large unified WLAN that expands the network coverage, significantly. Moreover, it results in a notable reduction of deployment costs and enhancement of customer satisfaction. Hence, as one of the key contributions of this dissertation, a cooperative framework for fine-grained AP association in dense WLANs is presented. On top of this framework, a thorough formulation and a heuristic solution to solve the aforementioned problems are introduced. The key enabler of the proposed solution is Software Defined Networking (SDN) which not only gives us an exceptional level of granularity but also empowers us to utilize high-performance computing resources and more sophisticated algorithms. Also, over the past few years, some of the largest cellular operators restricted their unlimited data plans and proposed tiered charging plans enforced by either strict throttling or large overage fees. While cellular operators are trying to guarantee the QoS of their services in a cost-effective and profitable manner, WLANs and Wi-Fi Mesh Networks (WMNs) as viable complements can be used to form a multihop backhaul connection between the access and the core networks. Indeed, the utilization of WMNs provides an opportunity to achieve a high network capacity and wide coverage by the employment of inexpensive commercial off-the-shelf products. Moreover, by bridging the WMNs and cellular networks, and the fine-grained traffic engineering of network flows, it is possible to provide a cost-effective Internet access solution for people who cannot afford the high cost of data plans. However, there are certain requirements in terms of QoS for different services over multi-hop backhaul networks. In addition, the process of service provisioning in WMNs incorporates tightly correlated steps, including AP association, gateway selection, and backhaul routing. In most of the prior studies, these steps were investigated as independent NP-hard problems and no unified formulation that considers all these steps (at different tiers of WMNs) has been presented. Hence, as another contribution of this dissertation, a structured and thorough scheme to address the demands of end-users over SDN-aware WMNs is introduced. In contrast to most of the former work, this scheme takes the key characteristics of wireless networks into account, especially for Multi-Channel Multi-Radio WMNs. The proposed solution can be applied to the large-scale scenarios and finds a near-optimal solution in polynomial time. Furthermore, since the presented solution may split the packets of a single flow among multiple paths for routing and there are non-trivial drawbacks for its implementation, a randomized single-path flow routing for SDN-aware WMNs is introduced. The randomized nature of the introduced solution avoids the complexities of implementing a multi-path flow routing and it presents a viable routing scheme that guarantees certain performance bounds. The functionality and performance of all the presented solutions have been assessed through extensive numerical results and real testbed experimentations as a proof of concept. It is important to note that the solutions presented in this dissertation can be utilized to provide a large variety of services for Wi-Fi users, while they guarantee different QoS metrics. / Graduate

As redes de computadores têm evoluído para acomodar uma grande variedade de serviços, tais como streaming de vídeos de alta qualidade e entrega de conteúdo sensível a atrasos. Estes serviços têm aumentado a demanda por recursos não originalmente considerados na Internet. Com a promessa de atender novas demandas de rede rapidamente, pesquisadores propuseram Redes Programáveis, nas quais o comportamento dos dispositivos de rede pode ser alterado utilizando aplicativos. Entretanto, tal comportamento pode não ser um consenso entre usuários da rede. O surgimento de Redes Virtualizadas superou tal questão, ao permitir a coexistência de múltiplas redes virtuais sobre a mesma infraestrutura física. A fim de se obter redes virtuais isoladas com comportamento programável, foram propostas as Redes Virtuais Programáveis (RVP). Diante dessa nova realidade, os administradores de rede não estão mais olhando unicamente para dispositivos de rede. Eles estão olhando para um sistema composto de dispositivos e aplicativos de rede que definem o comportamento individual de cada rede virtual. Isso requer não apenas novas ferramentas e abordagens de gerenciamento, além disso, exige a revisão de conceitos tradicionais sobre redes. Implementações de RVP são encontradas principalmente em testbeds e ambientes de Computação em Nuvem. Testbeds são muito propícios à inovação, mas possuem fortes limitações no que diz respeito a migração de soluções experimentais para produção. Por outro lado, computação em nuvem é um ótimo ambiente de produção, mas possui restrições de flexibilidade e inovação, uma vez que as soluções de rede adotadas geralmente são proprietárias. Portanto, nesta dissertação introduz-se um novo modelo de negócio que permite a criação de soluções inovadoras em ambientes de produção, a Programabilidade de Redes como um Serviço (NPaaS). Diferente do modelo de negócio de redes tradicionais, onde os usuários finais são apenas consumidores dos serviços de rede já disponíveis, em NPaaS os usuários finais também são capazes de desenvolver e implantar novas soluções de rede. Para apoiar NPaaS, propõe-se uma plataforma de gerenciamento de rede virtual programável, chamada ProViNet. Essa plataforma fornece a arquitetura de software e estratégias necessárias para permitir a implantação e gestão NPaaS. Uma avaliação qualitativa do modelo de negócio NPaaS foi realizada, o resultado foi contrastado com alguns dos modelos de negócio praticados atualmente. Assim, enfatizando a singularidade do NPaaS. Enquanto isso, uma avaliação experimental foi realizada para demonstrar a viabilidade da plataforma ProViNet. Os resultados mostraram que NPaaS representa uma alternativa promissora para ambientes de rede virtual com acesso público, como as nuvens públicas. Além disso, uma avaliação quantitativa do protótipo da plataforma demonstrou a viabilidade técnica e provou que aplicativos de rede desenvolvidos usando BPMN são capazes de executar com desempenho aceitáveis. / Computer networks have evolved to accommodate a wide variety of services, such as streaming of high quality videos and delay-sensitive content delivery. These services have increased the demand for features not originally considered in the Internet. Aiming to address novel network demands quickly, some researchers proposed Programmable Networks, in which network devices behavior can be changed using applications. Notwithstanding, such behavior might not be a consensus between computer network stakeholders. The emergence of Virtualized Networks overcame this issue by allowing the coexistence of multiple virtual networks on the same physical infrastructure. Finally, the convergence of programmability and virtualization techniques are explored within a third concept, the Programmable Virtual Networks (PVN). Faced with this new reality, network administrators are no longer just looking at network devices. They are looking at a system made of virtual devices and applications that define each virtual network behavior. This requires not just new tools and management approaches, over and above that, requires new thinking. PVN deployments are found mostly in shared experimental facilities (also known as testbeds) and Cloud Computing environments. Testbeds are very innovation friendly, but with strong limitations in regards to taking experimental solutions to production. On the other hand, Cloud computing is a great production environment, but presents flexibility and innovation restrictions once network solutions adopted are usually proprietary. Therefore, in this dissertation it is introduced Network Programming as a Service (NPaaS), a new business model that aims to facilitate the conduct of innovative solutions for production environments. Different from traditional network business models, where end-users are just consumers of network services already available, in NPaaS, end-users are also able to develop and deploy novel network solutions. To support NPaaS, Programmable Virtual Network management platform is proposed. Such platform, named ProViNet, provides all architectural and technical features necessary to enable NPaaS deployment and management. A qualitative evaluation of the NPaaS business model was performed, and the result was contrasted with some of the current models, thus, emphasizing the singularity of NPaaS. In the meanwhile, an experimental evaluation was conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of ProViNet platform. Results have shown that NPaaS represent a promising alternative for virtual network environments with public access such as public clouds. Moreover, a quantitative evaluation of the platform prototype demonstrated the technical feasibility and proved that network applications developed using BPMN are able to run with acceptable performance rates.