System-Level Virtualization and Mobile IP to Support Service Mobility

In many areas of ICT the use of virtualization techniques has decoupled the binding between physical resources and functional roles assigned to them. While the use of virtualization in computing systems is already extremely popular, similar forms of virtualization have been proposed for the network infrastructure as well. In such a context, we propose a new paradigm that aims at extending the concept of virtualization to network services, by decoupling service execution environments and their physical location. We call this paradigm Service Switching. In a service switching environment, service instances may be dynamically migrated across geographically dispersed data centers to pursue better usage of both network and computing resources.