Network service description and discovery for the next generation internet

The Internet has fallen victim to its own stunning success and the current Internet architecture faces many challenges. Recently the research community started exploring "clean-slate" approaches to develop new network architectures for the Internet. Due to the highly diversified requirements for the next generation Internet, it is very likely that multiple network architectures will co-exist in near future. Such a diversified Internet architecture requires an overall framework that would increase composability and interoperability. One of the challenges lies in enabling collaboration crossing heterogeneous network domains without exposing implementation details of each domain. The service-oriented architecture has been successfully applied in Web services and Grid computing to address the problem of inter-domain resource collaboration. In this paper, we apply the service-oriented idea to support the diversified architecture for the next generation Internet. We propose a service-oriented networking (SON) structure and specifically investigates network service description and discovery, two key components for SON. The main contributions of this paper include a new approach for describing network service capabilities and a technique for discovering appropriate network services that meet performance requirements. The developed technologies enable effective collaboration among heterogeneous network domains with various implementations; thus supporting Internet diversity.