Network Service Chaining (NSC) is a service deployment concept that promises increased flexibility and cost efficiency for future carrier networks. NSC has received considerable attention in the standardization and research communities lately. However, NSC is largely undefined in the peer-reviewed literature. In fact, a literature review reveals that the role of NSC enabling technologies is up for discussion, and so are the key research challenges lying ahead. This paper addresses these topics by motivating our research interest towards advanced dynamic NSC and detailing the main aspects to be considered in the context of carrier-grade telecommunication networks. We present design considerations and system requirements alongside use cases that illustrate the advantages of adopting NSC. We detail prominent research challenges during the typical lifecycle of a network service chain in an operational telecommunications network, including service chain description, programming, deployment, and debugging, and summarize our security considerations. We conclude this paper with an outlook on future work in this area.

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Research Directions in Network Service Chaining

Network virtualization is considered an important potential solution to the gradual ossification of the Internet. In a network virtualization environment, a set of virtual networks share the resources of a common physical network although each virtual network is isolated from others. Benefits include increased flexibility, diversity, security and manageability. Resource discovery and allocation are fundamental steps in the process of creating new virtual networks. This paper surveys previous work on, and the present status of, resource discovery and allocation in network virtualization. We also describe challenges and suggest future directions for this area of research.

Resource Discovery and Allocation in Network Virtualization

The Publish-Subscribe Internet Routing Paradigm (PSIRP) project aims at developing and evaluating an information-centric architecture for the future Internet. The ambition is to provide a new form of internetworking which will offer the desired functionality, flexibility, and performance, but will also support availability, security, and mobility, as well as innovative applications and new market opportunities. This paper illustrates the high level architecture developed in the PSIRP project, revealing its principles, core components, and basic operations through example usage scenarios. While the focus of this paper is specifically on the operations within the architecture, the revelation of the workings through our use cases can also be considered relevant more generally for publish-subscribe architectures.

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Illustrating a publish-subscribe Internet architecture

The clean-slate approach to future Internet design: a survey of research initiatives

One possible key technology for the future Internet is network virtualization. It allows to run numerous virtual networks in parallel, each of which can be adapted towards different requirements, intended use, or applications used. When consequently using network virtualization, it allows not only to have very specialized networks but also allows to run new protocols and services in different networks. This can give opportunities for rapid service deployment, especially for services based on new protocols. Currently a lot of research is concerned with network virtualization or related aspects like management or signaling of network virtualization. This paper however is different, since it looks on network virtualization from another angle. We describe our Node Architecture for the Future Internet, which uses network virtualization as a fundamental concept. It has the goal to give users access to a vast number of virtual networks and exploit the possibilities of network virtualization.

A Node Architecture for 1000 Future Networks

A flexible framework for Future Internet design, assessment, and operation

The current Internet architecture nicely structures functionality into layers of protocols. While this reduces complexity, many tweaks have emerged because of the architecture's limited flexibility. Cross Layer Functionality corrodes the layer boundaries, intermediate layers had to be introduced for protocols like MPLS and IPsec, and middleboxes - like in case of NAT - further complicate the interaction of protocols. To overcome these problems, many publications have proposed modular solutions or protocol composition, allowing software engineering ideas to improve protocol design. Other publications state that instead of choosing a single common network architecture for the Future Internet, it might be advantageous to run multiple different architectures in parallel. We combine both approaches and make it possible to rapidly create and run different network architectures in parallel. While this allows for simplified Future Internet development, it requires the network architecture to be dynamically chosen. This paper not only presents a node architecture enabling the parallel operation of different network architectures but also introduces algorithms for their selection at runtime.

Selecting Concurrent Network Architectures at Runtime

The current socket API is one obstacle for innovation in the Internet. In order to communicate, applications need a lot of networking know-how: They need to perform name-to-address resolution, select an appropriate transport protocol, and they need to implement application-layer protocols. If new transport protocols are introduced, an existing application needs to be modified in order to support them. If multiple protocols and address families are available at the same time, the application needs to select one of them. We therefore propose a new application-to-network interface that reduces the necessary networking know-how at application-level to foster independent evolutions of applications and the network stack. To achieve this goal, networking functionality currently done by the applications themselves is pushed down below the API. Our interface aims at being simple and intuitive for the application programmer, separating application and networking concerns, and being suitable for any current and future networking technology.

A future-proof application-to-network interface

In many Future Internet visions, a node is assumed to be connected to a multitude of possibly virtualized networks, each being optimized for a specific application. Within such a network, application-tailored network architectures and protocols provide communication services between the nodes. In order to handle such a number of different architectures and protocols, new management paradigms need to be considered, allowing for a flexible and extensible Future Internet. In this work, we therefore propose a management model for the Future Internet that provides flexibility and extensibility regarding node management while mastering complexity by a hierarchical management structure that allows for information aggregation and task delegation.

Denis Martin

Papers

A Node Architecture for 1000 Future Networks

A flexible framework for Future Internet design, assessment, and operation

Selecting Concurrent Network Architectures at Runtime

A future-proof application-to-network interface

A Hierarchical Node Management System for Application-tailored Network Protocols and Architectures