Network Service Interface - gateway for future network services

Purpose The NSI main objective is to provide a unified communication method enabling independent single domain resource management tools to collaborate at global scale providing multi-domain services in heterogeneous environments. Approach The NSI research was driven by specialists experienced in dynamic provisioning system and resources allocation. The protocol design was a result of long discussions and evaluations of proposed architectures and ideas. Findings The NSI efforts was focused on network provisioning and resulted in specification of NSI Connection Service (CS) protocol v1.0, released in 2011, and adopted by a set of independent network provisioning tools. Successful demonstrations at the end of year 2011 have proven the potential of the protocol and estimated direction of further development. Research limitation The NSI CS needs to meet requirements of many users and network providers in order aggregate them and to deliver a single communication language for global resources allocation. There is a need to enhance security mechanism of NSI, topology modeling and advertisement, monitoring features, and accounting, before the protocols could be used in purely operational environment. Practical implications The research is mainly driven by high capacity demanding users and operators of NRENs around the world, who found present inter-networks circuit creation methods inconvenient and inefficient, as those are mostly manual processes without any automation. The NSI is giving a proposal on how to introduce multi-domain dynamic services to all interested researchers. Value The paper describes a new concept of multi-domain resources management, where services can go beyond single domain boundaries facing current research community requirements. The proposed NSI framework is not a tool or application, but rather a language that can be learned by provisioning tools to communicate each other. This feature in correlation with open standard implies unlimited scalability