A hierarchical mechanism for the scalable deployment of services over large programmable and heterogeneous networks

Abstract

This paper presents a novel mechanism that enables scalable service deployment over programmable heterogeneous networks. For ease of service deployment, it is expected that network management tools will require the network itself to participate in this task so as to be able to scale to very large number of network elements, with widely varying programmability levels. The type of services considered is very broad, ranging from routing services involving only selected nodes of a network to end-to-end services spanning the entire network. Successive steps of the mechanism to deploy new services into a network automatically are presented. The algorithmic structure of the mechanism described is then illustrated by several examples showing its applicability and complexity.