Network and service governance for the management of future networks

The emergence of new technologies and services forces the network operator to manage uniformly and efficiently the complex network environment of Future Networks. The interworking of multiple underlying heterogeneous network domains with proprietary network management systems is currently a tedious task, and this fact will be exacerbated in the near future. To this end, we address the challenge of dynamic, efficient administration of Future Networks introducing the Network Governance paradigm; the latter automates the dynamic joint network and service management while fulfilling different QoS requirements for the users. The proposed governance framework supports the dynamic definition of operators' business goals, their translation to network policies and management actions and their enforcement onto the network. Moreover, an experimental case study on management of FFTH and WLAN testbeds has been implemented through two main mechanisms: policy-driven wireless access load balancing and self-diagnosis and monitoring, thereby proving the feasibility and applicability of the introduced concepts. The results show the performance gains including e.g. the QoS optimisation for packet loss and delay for a user class.