The path towards an Internet's SON: Service Oriented Networking

The work described in this Ph.D. thesis deals with the evolution of the current Internet architecture towards a communication model suited for dealing with services rather then with nodes and processes. The work introduces some practical use cases to describe the current ``as a service`` orientation of many network applications, and the required new degrees of flexibility in the resources management and deployment. Several solutions to this aim are designed, implemented and evaluated when integrated in the legacy network infrastructure. Furthermore, the thesis explores the concepts of network virtualization and software defined networking, both in practical and theoretical aspects, applying them to the concrete design of a networking architecture that enables the split of network identifier and locator concepts. The proposed architecture is a first step towards an implementation of a service oriented architecture on top of the current Internet. At the same time, the thesis provides an example on how network protocols can be used in a new way without changing their dynamics, or using a term familiar to software engineer, how they can be ``overloaded``, to create new functions provided that the network control plane is correctly designed to handle them.