Design of a Network Service Architecture

Considerable research efforts in the networking community are focused on defining a new Internet architecture that not only solves some of the problems of the current design, but also meets future needs. Our work focuses on the issue of how to provide suitable abstractions for communication between end-systems. This is a particularly important aspect of the network architecture as it is exposed to all applications and also determines what kind of services can be provided by the network. We present an architecture for network services that are implemented on router systems. We illustrate how control and data plane interact to provide the necessary end-to-end functionality. Our prototype implementation indicates that such a design is feasible and scalable for high-performance networks.