Resumen
This article reports on the service creation and management in active telecommunication management. A recent research in the area of active networking has demonstrated strong potential for this new technology. From the service point of view active networking allows customized packet processing inside the network on a per-packet, per-flow, or per-service basis. From the management perspective, active networking technology facilitates rapid service deployment and flexible service management. The paradigm of active networking allows a party to install and run a service on a network in a manner similar to the way a program is installed and executed on a computer. While suggesting attractive benefits, active networking also poses serious challenges that must be overcome for this technology to gain acceptance for use in telecom environments. A key challenge in this context is to develop a new concept for service creation and management. This article presents such a framework, based upon the concept of network visualization and on a generic service, which is called the Virtual Active Network (VAN) service. The VAN captures the functionality and resources a provider offers to a customer. The VAN provides a generic service abstraction for an active network environment. In traditional network environments, the customer has a simple service abstraction and perceives a service essentially as a black box with access points. In contrast, the VAN is a much more flexible service abstraction than today's virtual path or flow-based abstractions.