Autonomic service deployment in networks

Networks have been growing dramatically in size and functionality in the past years: IP 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.