Towards a relation oriented service architecture

Over the past three decades, the Internet has evolved from a point to point, open, academic network to an applications and services oriented critical infrastructure. The Internet has become a vital component of society today, from its simple origin as an academic research project. During this transition, numerous applications and usages of the network emerged that cannot be efficiently implemented by adhering to the original design tenets of the Internet. Some of the tenets have been broken, others diluted and new ones are emerging to accommodate new paradigms. Moreover, applications and services have been moving slowly but consistently towards a uniform model based on Service Oriented Approach (SOA). The shift towards abstract models, objects and services however is not efficiently supported by the underlying delivery platforms, especially the legacy Internet architecture. An architectural rethinking is necessary at the network level well to accommodate future services, applications and routing priorities. We argue that there is a pressing need to move towards a next generation network architecture built to natively support network resource abstraction, mobility, security, enhanced routing, privacy, context communications, QoS, parallel processing, heterogeneous networking etc. This change should be manifested according to the principles of SOA to ensure interoperability, backwards compatibility and migration. In this paper, we propose 'relationship' as the glue that can hold together various available services and discuss the motivation behind the thoughts to introduce the tenets for the new architecture in the form of a new framework called ROSA. We define 'Relation' as an association among dynamically collaborating nodes, devices and services in a network, characterized by 'relationship metrics'.