An Autonomic Service Delivery Platform for Service-Oriented Network Environments

Abstract

Service-oriented architectures offer a more effective and flexible approach to integrating technology with business processes than traditional information technology (IT) architectures. Service-oriented architectures are the foundation for both next-generation telecommunications and middleware architectures, which are rapidly converging on top of commodity transport services. Services such as triple/quadruple play, multimedia messaging, and presence are enabled by the emerging service-oriented IP Multimedia Subsystem, and allow telecommunications service providers to maintain, if not improve, their position in the marketplace. Service-oriented architectures are aggressively leveraged in next-generation middleware systems as the system model of choice to interconnect service consumers and providers within and between enterprises.

We leverage previous research in active, overlay, and peer-to-peer networking technologies, along with recent advances in XML and Web Services, to create the paradigm of service-oriented networking (SON). SON is an emerging architecture that enables network devices to operate at the application layer to provide functions such as service-based routing, content transformation, and protocol integration to consumers and providers. By adding application-awareness into the network fabric, SON can act as a next-generation federated enterprise service bus that provides vast gains in overall performance and efficiency, and enables the integration of heterogeneous environments.

The contributions of this research are threefold: first, we formalize SON as an architecture and discuss the challenges in building SON devices. Second, we discuss issues in interconnecting SON devices to create large-scale service-oriented middleware and telecommunications systems; in particular, we discuss the concept of federations of enterprise service buses, and present two protocols that enable a distributed service registry to support the federation. Finally, we propose an autonomic service delivery platform for service-oriented network environments. The platform enables a self-optimizing infrastructure that balances the goals of maximizing the business value derived from processing service requests and the optimal utilization of IT resources.