A Novel Service Composition Mechanism for the Future Optical Internet

The evolution of IT and network technologies has generated enormous opportunities for complex service innovation. However, the heterogeneous nature of the resources required for providing such complex services demand efficient coordination of distributed high-end IT resources (storage and computing) interconnected by high-capacity optical networks. To address this issue, a service plane architecture is proposed. The service plane architecture orchestrates and facilitates interconnection of heterogeneous optical networks, IT resources, and requestors of services (clients). We analyze and investigate one of the vital elements of this architecture: the description and dissemination of resource-state information required for service composition. We also analyze the impact of resource-state information accuracy on service provisioning performance. A service-oriented resource discovery mechanism has been developed to facilitate resource-state information discovery and dissemination. Several novel resource abstraction models and a novel resource update algorithm for the proposed service plane are presented and their performance evaluated. The results show that our algorithms are able to facilitate accurate resource-state information with significantly low signaling overheads.