A strategic search method for requirement-aware functional-block selection and composition in a flexible network

Internet applications have reached such a high complexity that the network stack concept introduced decades ago is not suitable anymore. Future Internet research activities try to increase the flexibility of the Internet in order to allow the network to adapt to present and future requirements and applications. A well known approach is to build protocol graphs, which will be used instead of inflexible network stacks, by connecting functional blocks together. A functional block encapsulates a particular network function. The protocol graph that should be used is the one most suitable to the application's requirements. To find the most suitable graph, all possible protocol graphs must be evaluated. However, the number of possible protocol graphs increases exponentially as the number of functional blocks increases. This article presents a method of modeling the protocol graph search space as a set of search trees and then using search strategies to manage the inherent complexity of the search process. We evaluate our proposed method by simulation.