What is the Service -Driven Network?

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What is the Service-Driven Network?

• Introduction
• Dynamic Management
• First Example: Real-Time Networking Services
• Second Example: Just-in-Time Client Services

Introduction

The Service-Driven Network is an approach to the provision of network computing. To understand it, first forget about the technology. Instead, concentrate on the services you want to provide. These range from the low-level services that manage relationships between networked devices (for example to configure routers on the fly to allocate the required bandwidth end-to-end), to the value-added services you provide to end-users. These services will drive your network.

The Service-Driven Network is flexible and modular, based on Java technology and thin clients. It speeds up service creation and deployment, as well as handling provisioning, management and billing. And it does all of that faster and more cheaply than a traditional network.

But you do not have to throw out your existing infrastructure to start running a Service-Driven Network: this paradigm interacts with your existing network.

Dynamic Management

The dynamic reconfiguration enabled by the Service-Driven Network is crucial to the deployment of emerging network applications. These applications depend on policy-based management in areas such as quality of service and security. Implementing these policies requires that the devices on a path between network source and destination be dynamically configured in a specific way.

For example, you need to dynamically configure the path between users and the services they may request from anywhere on the network. The services, such as value-added applications, must be tied to the user rather than to a particular device. And the network must be responsive enough to push the service to the user's device in real time and according to that user's subscribed policies.

The Java Dynamic Management Kit provides the foundation for the Service-Driven Network, by providing the technology needed for building autonomous management services, and distributing them to network devices.

First Example: Real-Time Networking Services

The graphic below shows how using a Service-Driven Network, you can push networking services in real time to network infrastructure equipment such as routers. The services can be updated at any time, automatically. For example, the Service-Driven Network enables dynamic management of quality of service policies, security policies, software upgrades and versioning.

Second Example: Just-in-Time Client Services

This example shows how the Service-Driven Network can be used to provide value-added user services. The user buys a generic web-phone from a retail outlet. As soon as the phone is plugged in, an on-line registration web page is displayed. The user fills this in, marking preferences for services such as email, fax, home banking and e-commerce. The registration form is sent, and the server automatically downloads the appropriate services to the user's web-phone.

Upgrades to these services, changes in the user configuration, and new services, are downloaded in the same way, over time. The user does not have to do anything; everything is downloaded automatically to the web-phone client.

In both of these examples, Java Dynamic Management agents would be located in the devices, either network controllers or end-user devices. The service managers access and control these agents. The managers are also Java applications which are developed with the manager APIs and tools of the Java Dynamic Management Kit.