The Fluid Internet: Service-Centric Management of a Virtualized Future Internet

The Internet was originally designed as a best effort packet forwarding substrate. However, since its inception, its purpose has shifted toward a rich service-centric delivery platform. Its underlying infrastructure as well as the number of connected devices have taken on immense proportions, and sharing of capabilities has come into widespread use. Moreover, the Internet's services are becoming increasingly interactive, context-aware, and content-oriented. This has led to stringent delivery requirements being imposed on the underlying infrastructure. Despite these evolutions, management of the Internet has not evolved significantly. It remains largely static and is unable to provide dynamic end-to-end service delivery guarantees in a cost-effective manner. In this article, we propose the Fluid Internet, a novel paradigm aimed at tackling these management challenges. The Fluid Internet seamlessly provisions virtualized infrastructure capabilities, adapting the delivery substrate to the dynamic requirements of services and users, much like a fluid adapting to fit its surroundings. As such, the Fluid Internet gives a service provider the ability to manage its services end to end and elastically. Our vision is achieved through a unification of concepts from network virtualization, cloud computing, and service-centric networking. The relevant stakeholders, as well as their functions and interactions, are described. Additionally, we identify the major technical challenges that remain to be tackled for the Fluid Internet vision to become a reality.