Implementing the Future Internet: A Case Study of Service Discovery using Pub/Sub in the ANA Framework

The goal of the Autonomic Network Architecture (ANA) project is to define and implement a novel, flexible and extensible network architecture to interconnect and federat e multiple heterogeneous networks in an autonomic way. In order to achieve this, a framework which allows to dynamically compose a protocol stack from different modules, called Functional Blocks, was built and is currently in the prototyping phase. In this paper we discuss how the flexibility and modularity of the ANA framework helps to integrate new protocols beyond the legacy IP world. As a case study we describe the implementation of a Publish/Subscribe system. Specifically, we use Pub/Sub mechanisms for service discovery in a wireless self-organizing network by routing service subscriptions to published services, with a field based routing protocol. We exemplarily decompose the functionality of such a system into small, exchangeable Functional Blocks. By means of this example we demonstrate the benefits of such a flexible architecture and show how it enables truly autonomic networking.