Management of new federated services

Abstract

The explosive growth of the Internet, widespread use of the World Wide Web, and a trend towards deployment of broadband residential networks are stimulating the development of new services such as interactive shopping, home banking, and electronic commerce. These services are federated since they depend on an infrastructure that spans multiple independent control domains. Managing federated services and providing effective support to the customer of these services is difficult, because only a small part of the environment can be observed and controlled by any given authority. We characterize different dimensions of this problem, using our experience with the deployment of a system that gives the home consumer broadband access to community content as well as to the Internet. This type of system is referred to as Broadband Interactive Data Services or BIDS. We then focus on diagnosis and describe a customer support tool that was developed to partially automate diagnosis in BIDS. We use the experience with this tool to derive a blueprint for a general architecture for managing federated services. The architecture is based on service contracts between control domains.