Tanc: Towards Autonomic Network Connectivity

Thanks to virtualization, network operators are opening their network & IT infrastructure and offering network & IT Cloud services. Soon after this trend spreads within end-users devices, the edge will be able to instantiate virtual resources on-the-fly, share connectivity, computing and storage resources with edge devices or even be integrated as fully part of the infrastructure. In this article, we provide architectural guidelines and depict the typical phases required for enabling this extension at the edge. After having defined the concepts of resource node and domain, we present the Resource Discovery, Domain Orchestration, Resource Federation and Domain Supervision phases. The actions required to fulfill the phases are highlighted. An illustrating example and running proof-of-concept named TANC: Towards Autonomic Network Connectivity is depicted. This demonstration shows how edge resource nodes can firstly be embedded in the network & IT infrastructure, before being dynamically specialized and modelled depending on the instantaneous needs. In particular, software components are dynamically fetched from a component repository. Furthermore, before specialization, the resource nodes cannot be distinguished one from the other, just like a stem cell is firstly generic before becoming a specific cell. Our work is a first step towards the marking out of edge usages, which are currently drastically evolving.