Service provisioning and management in virtual private active networks

Service providers have been motivated to develop and offer new services to their customers. The key question is what kind of futuristic and practical services customers need. This paper presents a novel service called Virtual Private Active Network (VPAN) which allows clients to create Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) among domains using Active Network (AN) technology. This service is new in the sense of we show how to provide VPNs using the AN technology and how to perform the policy-based management in this scenario. We briefly outline the Mobile Service Management System for Virtual Active Networks (MS2VAN) which is a framework we developed to offer Virtual Active Networks (VANs) and manage services in the same domain. Afterwards, we show how the MS2VAN can be used to provide and manage VPANs. We present the protocol to let a user create a VPAN, the protocol to allow a user to enter in a VPAN and, finally, the protocol to manage VPANs.