Service-oriented networking for the next generation distributed computing

With the rapid development of various emerging technologies, such as Web services, Grid computing, and cloud computing, computer networks have become the integrant of the next generation distributed computing systems. Networking systems have a significant impact on distributed application performance; therefore, they must be integrated with other computational resources in distributed computing systems to support the requirements of high-performance distributed applications. This chapter presents a new Service-Oriented Networking (SON) paradigm that enables the integration of networking and distributed computing systems. The SON applies the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) principle and employs network virtualization for abstracting networking resources in the form of network services, which can be described, discovered, and composed in distributed computing environments. This chapter particularly discusses network service description and discovery as key technologies for realizing the SON, and describes a network service broker system for discovering the network services that meet the performance requirements of distributed applications. A general modeling approach to describing network service capabilities and an information updating mechanism are also presented in this chapter, which can improve the performance of the network service broker system in heterogeneous and dynamic networking environments.