Designing Networking Service for Multimedia Service Composition over Programmable Network Substrate

Multimedia service composition provides a flexible way of building customized multimedia content production and delivery by composing distributed multimedia-oriented services dynamically to provide new functionalities. Previous researches have addressed various aspects of multimedia service composition such as composability, QoS-awareness, and load balancing. Most of them however have assumed that multimedia-oriented services are composed mainly with resources located on the computing devices while taking the required networking support as granted. However, realizing the required networking support is a challenging task and it acutally needs fundamental upgrade to the existing network infrastructure (i.e., for the network infrastructure of disruptive Future Internet). As a partial answer to this futuristic networking challenge, in this paper, we introduce the concept of so-called networking services that run on network devices to provide networking-related functionalities required for multimedia service composition. By composing the designed networking services with the computing-type services, we could dynamically configure and provide the necessary networking characteristics for the targeted multimedia applications. To validate the concept of designed networking services, by taking required networking connectivity as an example, we attempt an early instantiation of networking services over Open Flow-based programmable network substrate.