Support for service composition in i3
Karthik Lakshminarayanan, Ion Gabriel Stoica, Klaus Wehrle · 2004
We consider the problem of service composition in a wide area network, where an end-user can send its packets through intermediate processing points (middleboxes) which can perform a variety of services. Example of such services are filtering, intrusion detection, anonymization, transcoding, and caching. In this paper, we argue that the Internet Indirection Infrastructure (i3)--an overlay network architecture that enables users to locate services and control the path followed by their packets--provides a natural platform for service composition. We discuss the challenges in implementing service compositions on top of i3, and suggest several approaches to address these challenges.