Designing the Governance Framework for Network and Service Management in Future Networks

Future Networks will constitute a complex, highly miscellaneous, decentralized and dynamic environment, the requirements of which cannot be handled by traditional management schemes. The alternative is the approach of governance framework of service and network management, which targets at guidance of the behavior of autonomic and legal network entities and resources, based on specific service demands and business goals. Governance framework will enable the realization of overall control of multi-vendor environment and resources, coherent network behavior, programmability and control autonomy, through policies. To this effect, this paper presents the main challenges of governance framework; the specification of the operators' high level objectives for the determination of the behavior of the managed elements/resources, and the final realization of these from the targeted elements, as well as, the interaction between human operator and network infrastructures. Based on their elaboration, the focus is placed on existing concepts that can constitute the basis for the design of a proper governance framework. In this context, the paper presents the design of a proper interface between the human operator and the network infrastructures, and of suitable functions and techniques for realization of the operator's objectives from the targeted elements, along with implementation information.