Service Instantiation in an Internet with Choices

New Internet architectures have been proposed to address some of the shortcomings of the current Internet. Many new architectures represent existing and novel networking functionality as network "services". These services are fundamental building blocks that need to be described and can be composed in an effective manner. Any service-based network architecture fundamentally struggles to assign specific physical resources to a service when a user requests for a service. This "instantiation" problem of mapping an advertised service to a reservable physical entity becomes complex when advanced services comprise of multiple basic services. In our work, we present a resolution to the service instantiation problem that can identify multiple potential solutions. Since candidate solutions may use multiple metrics to express quality, our approach takes into account multiple criteria and yields results that are fewer in number but more optimal than others in nature. We show that this approach can be used to to make an efficiently tradeoff between time taken and the number of solutions obtained without having to explore the complete solution space. Thus, our approach presents a practical heuristic for instantiating network services in the future Internet.