Assuring Mobile Physical Services for the New Generation of Networks

Abstract

The development of computing and communication systems has gone through a spiral cycle of centralization and decentralization schemas. The earliest telephone network used decentralized point-to-point connections. It moved to centralized switching system as the number of devices increased. The centralized computing and communication systems further moved into a decentralized paradigm, as devices expand and dependability of large systems becomes a dominating factor. The current cloud computing and communication systems appear to be a centralized system where computing and communication resources are not in the client computers but in an integrated infrastructure. Nevertheless, the implementation of the centralized infrastructure is equipped with decentralized and redundant resources, which makes the system more dependable as any internal failures can be tolerated internally. However, the terminal devices and their interfaces to the centralized infrastructure remain vulnerable to the single-point-of-failures. This paper focuses on terminal devices and their interfaces to the new generation of assurance network and presents the challenges of making the devices and the interfaces as dependable as the assurance network. The idea of achieving the goal is through a pool of Mobile Physical Services (MPS) that can connect to multiple networks and can be shared by neighboring users.