Automatic Network Service Discovery and Selection in Virtualization-Based Future Internet

The next generation Internet is expected to support a wide range of network applications with highly diverse requirements. Network virtualization, which will play a key role in the future Internet, allows a large number of service providers to offer various network services upon shared network infrastructure. Therefore, discovery and selection of the most appropriate network service for meeting the requirement of each application becomes an important issue in the virtualization-based future Internet. The Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) offers an effective architectural principle for heterogeneous system integration that may facilitate realizing the notion of network virtualization. The research reported in this paper explores application of the SOA in network virtualization to address the network service discovery and selection problem. A broker system is proposed based on the SOA for automatic network service discovery and selection, a scalable and efficient protocol is developed for updating network service information, and the multi-attribute decision making technique is employed for ranking and selecting network services to meet application requirements. Performance evaluation results are also presented in the paper to show the effectiveness of the proposed system and developed protocol and algorithm.