Network Services on Service Extensible Routers

Service creation on extensible routers requires a concise specification of component-based network services to be deployed and extended at node run-time. The specification method needs to cover the data-flow oriented nature of network services with service-internal control relations. Hence, it needs to provide the concept of functional service composition that hides the complexity of a distributed, dynamically code-extensible system. We propose the PromethOS NP service model and its Service Programming Language to answer this challenge. They provide the concepts and methods to specify a network service as a graph of service chains with service components, and service-internal control relations. In this paper, we present the concepts of our service model, the syntax and semantics of its Service Programming Language, and demonstrate their applicability by an exemplary service specification.