The main objective of this project is to develop innovative contributions (e.g., techniques, algorithms, methodologies, and the like) to support efficient discovery, management, monitoring and protection of VNs. All derived research activities will be based on the research efforts on the network virtualization architecture design. Novelty and timeliness of this project offer inherent capacity to bring forth several scientific contributions, specifically a VN architecture with techniques and algorithms capable of (i) performing efficient and dynamic resource discovery and allocation, (ii) assessing quality of protection of resources and components, (iii) ensuring scalability with the number of requests and according to the available resources through independent and distributed components, and (iv) ensuring stability and robustness of the deployed VNs.