Networks have been growing dramatically in size and functionality in past years. Internet Protocol network nodes not only forward datagrams using longest-prefix matching of the destination address, but also execute functions based on dynamic policies such as proxy-caching, encryption, tunneling, and firewalling. More recently, programmable behaviors have begun to appear in network elements, allowing experimentation with even more sophisticated services. This paper presents an autonomic approach to network service deployment that scales to large heterogeneous networks. Topological categories of service deployment are introduced. A two-phase deployment mechanism that is split into hierarchically distributed and central computations is presented and illustrated with examples of actual services in a programmable network environment, together with their deployment algorithms and simulation results. Autonomic service deployment allows the distributed and complex capabilities present in network elements to be leveraged more efficiently when installing new services than is possible in traditional centralized network management-based approaches. As a result, installation is faster and use of functional resources is more optimized. A network manager faces a daunting task today when designing, configuring, and provisioning a complete service for customers, and when trying to obtain the most use of the specific capabilities available in sophisticated network elements such as programmable routers, encryption and transcoding gateways, traffic shapers and purifiers, and distributed caches, just to name a few. However, it would not be profitable to add more capabilities to a network, for instance, in the form of network processors, 1 unless they can be exploited efficiently when installing and running a service. If we consider an environment of networks with large numbers of nodes that have widely varying capabilities and resources and that need to be enabled with new services, it is necessary to define and provide a way to organize the deployment of new services at both the network and the node levels. The framework presented here addresses both levels globally, as well as the interactions taking place between them. Activities that focus on the deployment of services over heterogeneous programmable networks are still very few and do not focus on those aspects that are exacerbated in large networks. Policy-based networking allows a high-level policy to be transformed into lower-level network-node configurations. Such mechanisms depend on an efficient resource discovery and enablement, as presented here. Dynamic composition and deployment of services in the context of endto-end application sessions are addressed in Refer-
The autonomic service deployment in programmable networks REF allows deploying component-based services in large-scale networks.
Autonomic service deployment in networks
IBM Syst. J.
IBM Syst. J.
Computer Science