Un paradigma innovativo per moderni servizi di rete, il Service Switching.

The Internet was founded on a simple model in which the routers inside the network are responsible for forwarding packets from source to destination, and application programs run on the hosts connected to the edges of the network. However, the last few years have seen a blurring of the distinction between packet forwarding and application processing. In such a context we propose a new paradigm for modern networked services: the Service Switching. Composed by nodes capable to host services in addition to the traditional forwarding IP-based mechanism, the Service Switching infrastructure presents as its major feature the ability to implement a service migration mechanism among geographically distributed nodes, in order to make services seamlessly and transparently available to end-users regardless of their current location. A Service Switch can store and host different services and applications with their respective data providing a secure and differentiated execution environment, and it can coordinate its behavior with other Service Switches in order to develop and provide services in a distributed way, according to optimal resource utilization schemes. We propose an implementation of the Service Switching infrastructure based on virtualization mechanisms; such a technology allows to create isolated and self-contained virtual computing environments, completely independent from the underlying hardware.