Patent ID: 9537730
Date: 2017-01-03
CPC Classifications: H04L

Claim:
1. An apparatus comprising: a first interface with one or more entities; a second interface with a plurality of infrastructure providers; and a computation processor configured to allocate network resources available from the plurality of infrastructure providers to at least one of said one or more entities, wherein on receipt of a request for the provision of network resources, the computation processor is configured to determine whether or not the requested network resources can be provided on the basis of an existing network configuration and, if so, to instruct a configuration processor to provide the requested network resources, wherein the configuration processor is configured to receive a request to release at least some of the network resources provided to at least one of said one or more entities, and the configuration processor is configured to receive instructions instructing the configuration processor to release those resources, wherein the instructions for the configuration processor to release the resources are derived from at least a customer interface and a database, wherein the computation processor is configured to combine the network resources available from each of the plurality of infrastructure providers into a single combined set of network resources, wherein the computation processor is configured to split the combined set of network resources into different slices, wherein one of the network resources is split between a plurality of the one or more entities, and wherein the configuration processor is configured to release the different slices to the one or more entities.