NGL03-3: Provision of Active Services through Next Generation Networking Middleware

The evolution of next generation networking middleware (NGNM) yields to the provision of personalized next-generation active services, each one with different traffic characteristics and networking requirements for security, billing, QoS (Quality of Service), mobility, etc. in an efficient and economical usage of network resources. The introduction and well establishment of the active services concept, which will be services capable of dynamically adapting themselves to various underlying networking environment conditions according to the instructions of NGNM and the requirements posed by the end user, constitutes the major goal of this paper. In order to avoid proprietary and custom implementation solutions, an initial and generic active services reference architecture that can be followed by potential active services developers is presented. Finally, an implemented prototype that follows the proposed reference architecture provides a first quick validation of the discussed active service concept.

I. Introduction

Future generations of computer and communication systems are mainly driven by the users needs. The industry following customers expectations, foresees services supporting anyone, at anytime, anywhere in a seamless and secure way. In particular, personalized services provisioning is widely acknowledged as a key feature of the emerging large multi-service broadband networks. Indeed, these networks will have to support many disparate service classes, each with different traffic characteristics and requirements for networking functions dealing with security, billing, QoS (Quality of Service), mobility, etc. These heterogeneous service requests should be served in a way that it will both assure the qualitative provision of the particular requested service and make efficient and economical usage of network resources, so as to minimize operational costs and maximize network availability.