A NaaS-enabled framework for service composition in software defined networking environment

Service composition provides a flexible way of building customized service procedure by composing distributed atomic service components dynamically to provide new functionalities or support service chaining. Previous researches mainly focus on node mapping, composability, QoS-awareness, and load balancing, etc., and the networking support generally contains the connectivity and network capacity. Supporting specific networking functions or routing services between compute-related components is always neglected and still a challenging task for service composition, which actually needs fundamental upgrade to the existing network infrastructure. Software-defined networking has emerged as a promising network technology capable of supporting the next-generation services and networks. Therefore, in this paper, a framework for service composition enabling Network as a Service (NaaS) in software-defined networking environment is designed, which can provide customized networking services (e.g. multipath, multicast, multi-domain) between compute-related components to achieve a better and more flexible networking utility. We further implement a prototype for the service composition of an adaptive streaming service to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed framework. The experiment results are also presented to show its effectiveness.