A BPM-based solution for inter-domain circuit management

In the last few years, network middleware solutions have been proposed to deal with Quality of Service (QoS) demands of end-user network applications. Usually, such solutions employ virtual circuits, with end-points often located in different administrative domains. However, these middleware solutions still do not support online human decisions. The human-centered support is specially important when pre-installed rules do not suffice to evaluate virtual circuit requests. In this paper, we present a middleware for dynamic circuit networks (DCNs) based on the Business Process Management (BPM) approach to support human administrator decisions in virtual circuits provisioning. A set of experiments have been conducted in the Brazilian National Education and Research Network (RNP) backbone, and the findings in performance and flexibility are presented.