A common open interface to programmatically control and supervise open networks in the future internet

摘要

Currently, network environments are controlled manually or at a certain level of automation and are not able to provide network resources as a service. The emerging trend of Future Internet paradigms is to abstract and virtualize the network resources and functionalities, and to expose this virtualized resources and operations via interfaces providing a certain level of programmability. This level of programmability is twofold: the applications that use these interfaces can adapt themselves based on the network status, while the network can be aware of the traffic that is being generated by the applications. Many emerging technologies, which aim at concentrating network intelligence in a centralized entity, follow this trend, but also already affirmed and well-established technologies are adopting this approach. The resulting ecosystem is a fragmented set of interfaces that basically offer the same functionalities, but are not able to offer the users the ability to create multi-tenant applications on top of them. The main purpose of the architecture design that we present in this paper is to offer a single interface based on a RESTful paradigm that defines unified and common primitives to control and supervise network services and resources. This interface is situated between the application world and the entities that logically represent the network control plane.