Distributed Service Deployment over Programmable Networks

This paper presents the elements of a framework enabling QoS-aware service deployment over programmable heterogeneous networks. For ease of service deployment, it is expected that network management tools will require the network itself to participate in this task so as to be able to scale to very large numbers of network elements, with widely varying programmability levels. Three categories of service deployment are considered, namely services spanning along paths in the network, services involving only selected nodes, and combinations of both. The underlying hierarchical structure and the representation of capabilities used by the mechanism to deploy new services into a network automatically are presented. A formal description of the mechanism based on a Gather-Compute-Scatter paradigm is introduced and then illustrated by examples of all three service-deployment categories.