On the applicability of Architecture Description Languages to future internet networking environments

Architecture Description Languages enable the formalization of the architecture of systems and the execution of preliminary analysis on them, aiming at the identification and resolution of design problems in the early stages of development. Such problems can be incompatibilities and mismatches in the connections between system components and in the format and type of information exchanged between them. Architecture Description Languages were initially developed to validate the correctness of software architectures; however, their applicability has been extended to cover many diverse areas during the past few years. In this paper, we aim to show how Architecture Description Languages can be applied to and be a useful tool towards validating the correctness of architectures and configurations of future internet networking environments. We do so by using a recently proposed architectural approach and a recently proposed deployment approach, implemented by means of network virtualization, as case studies.