The current strong divide between applications and the network control plane is desirable for many reasons; but a downside is that the network is kept in the dark regarding the ultimate purposes and intentions of applications and, as a result, is unable to optimize for these. An alternative approach, explored in this paper, is for applications to declare to the network their abstract intents and assumptions; e.g. "this is a Tweet", or "this application will run within a local domain". Such an enriched semantic has the potential to enable the network better to fulfill application intent, while also helping optimize network resource usage across applications. We refer to this approach as 'intent driven networking' (IDN), and we sketch an incrementally-deployable design to serve as a stepping stone towards a practical realization of the IDN concept within today's Internet.
@cite_4: Abstract : Online services are typically replicated on multiple servers in different datacenters, and have (at best) a loose association with specific end-hosts or locations. To meet the needs of these online services, we introduce SCAFFOLD--an architecture that provides flow-based anycast with (possibly moving) service instances. SCAFFOLD allows addresses to change as end-points move, in order to retain the scalability advantages of hierarchical addressing. Successive refinement in resolving service names limits the scope of churn to ensure scalability while in-band signaling of new addresses supports seamless communication as end-points move. We design, build, and evaluate a SCAFFOLD prototype that includes an end-host network stack (built as extensions to Linux and the BSD socket API) and a network infrastructure (built on top of OpenFlow and NOX). We demonstrate several applications, including a cluster of web servers, partitioned memcached servers, and migrating virtual machines, running on SCAFFOLD.
@cite_23: 
@cite_2: This paper introduces a new paradigm for service oriented networking being developed in the FUSION project(1). Despite recent proposals in the area of information centric networking, a similar treatment of services - where networked software functions, rather than content, are dynamically deployed, replicated and invoked - has received little attention by the network research community to date. Our approach provides the mechanisms required to deploy a replicated service instance in the network and to route client requests to the closest instance in an efficient manner. We address the main issues that such a paradigm raises including load balancing, resource registration, domain monitoring and inter-domain orchestration. We also present preliminary evaluation results of current work.
@cite_5: Network use has evolved to be dominated by content distribution and retrieval, while networking technology still speaks only of connections between hosts. Accessing content and services requires mapping from the what that users care about to the network's where. We present Content-Centric Networking (CCN) which treats content as a primitive - decoupling location from identity, security and access, and retrieving content by name. Using new approaches to routing named content, derived heavily from IP, we can simultaneously achieve scalability, security and performance. We implemented our architecture's basic features and demonstrate resilience and performance with secure file downloads and VoIP calls.
@cite_15: Do-It-Yourself (DIY) networks are decentralised networks built by an (often) amateur community. As DIY networks do not rely on the need for backhaul Internet connectivity, these networks are mostly a mix of both offline and online networks. Although DIY networks have their own homegrown services, the current Internet-based cloud services are often useful, and access to some services could be beneficial to the community. Considering that most DIY networks have challenged Internet connectivity, migrating current service virtualisation instances could face great challenges. Service Centric Networking (SCN) has been recently proposed as a potential solution to managing services more efficiently using Information Centric Networking (ICN) principles. In this position paper, we present our arguments for the need for a resilient SCN architecture, propose a strawman SCN architecture that combines multiple transmission technologies for providing resilient SCN in challenged DIY networks and, finally, identify key challenges that need to be explored further to realise the full potential of our architecture.
@cite_11: Current ICN research favors a key-value-store view of the network, where location agnostic names typically resolve to documents, data blocks or sensor values. We believe that names should not only refer to data but also to functions and computation tasks. In Named Function Networking (NFN) the network's role becomes to resolve names to computations, par example by reducing λ-expressions. In doing so, the network starts acting like a computing machine, capable of not only caching content but also computation results. We present basic concepts of NFN and report on our implementation that embeds the name resolution logic of CCNx in a generic resolver of λ-expressions. We demonstrate its resolution power beyond mere content-pull, to also leverage code-drag and computation-push as well as generalizing CCNx protocol functions.
Information-centric networking (ICN) solutions have been proposed to convert networks into inherent content delivery systems @cite_5 . Similarly, service-centric networking (SCN) Also known as service-oriented networking. @cite_4 @cite_23 @cite_2 @cite_11 @cite_15 extends ICN principles to apply to services as well as content. Both ICN and SCN attempt to break away from statically binding to specific network resources. However, they only partly address the problems we have outlined in the specific cases of accessing content services: they do not naturally generalize to other scenarios, those involving switching of networks.