Context-aware service composition and delivery in NGSONs over SDN

NGSON is an IEEE sponsored effort to standardize an open service ecosystem where different stakeholders may cooperate to satisfy users' ever changing requirements by composing and delivering services dynamically across different service providers and network operators' domains. A main distinguishing feature of NGSON is context awareness, that is, the capability of collecting, processing, and using context information to drive the interactions of the NGSON overlay nodes with service and network operators' infrastructures for guaranteeing an optimal user experience. Recent advances in network control and management technologies, such as SDN, NFV, and service-oriented networking paradigms, are expected to make the network effectively able to cope with application service requirements in a more flexible, timely, and agile manner. In this article we discuss how NGSON, which already incorporates several aspects of virtualization, could take advantage of network virtualization mechanisms and programmable traffic steering capabilities to enhance and effectively support context-aware service composition along with adaptive service delivery. We propose an architectural model for NGSON that leverages these novel network service control capabilities and illustrate through a use case how this model could effectively be put into operation.