A service-oriented infrastructure for providing virtualized networks

The deployment of Internet Protocol television (IPTV)-like services or other content delivery solutions into constantly evolving telecommunication infrastructures requires significant efforts. Among many other facets, it involves developing an extensible architecture that is ready for future IPTV-like solutions and deploying an expensive dedicated service delivery infrastructure. To reduce the effort and cost of producing complete, dedicated solutions in an environment with ever shorter development and time-to-market cycles, we propose an infrastructure add-on to networks. The intelligent service–oriented network infrastructure (ISONI) separates service development from resource provisioning and deployment. It allows for testing and running several IPTV or other content delivery services of different sizes in parallel without affecting each other and introduces resource sharing capabilities into the deployed infrastructure. It follows the service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach as found within the Internet market. Service development is mostly detached from infrastructure management, glued together only via resource virtualization. ISONI can flexibly adapt to new service demands and can optimally utilize its existing resources. Service developers can realize new services more rapidly by concentrating on the service development process alone.