Network virtualisation has been hailed by the research community as a tool to enable a smooth transition to the Future Internet, by allowing the coexistence of different architectures and protocols over the same network infrastructure.
Recently, the interest from the operators and industry mainstream in network virtualization has grown quite significantly, as the potential benefits of virtualisation, both from an economical and an operational point of view, become clear. So far, the concept has been mainly a research topic and has been materialized in small-scale testbeds and research network environments. The challenges posed by the deployment of virtualisation in operator networks are still largely unknown and require urgent study. In this paper, we present the 4WARD architecture for network virtualisation and, based on this architecture, we propose a framework for network resource control in virtualisation-based network environments. We also present the developed virtual network testbed and the first results of isolation between different virtual networks.