Federated management of the Future Internet: Status and challenges

Abstract

The Internet's original static services have been superseded by rich multimedia services with stringent end-to-end quality-of-service requirements. Additionally, there has been a trend from simple applications offered by a single provider towards service compositions, managed across the bounds of multiple domains. It is widely accepted that the end-to-end requirements of multimedia and composed services cannot be satisfied by the current Internet, which does not support inter-domain collaboration. The network federation paradigm was advanced to address these limitations. It envisions the automatic negotiation and management of dynamic agreements between network domains, allowing them to collaborate to achieve goals they cannot achieve alone. This article presents an overview of state-of-the-art research in the area of federated network management. Specifically, existing definitions are compared and aligned. Moreover, the most important efforts towards an architecture for a federated Future Internet are discussed. Finally, we have identified several important research challenges that need to be tackled before the federated Future Internet vision can be fully achieved. For each of these challenges, existing research efforts are surveyed and remaining open issues identified. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.