Functional composition in future networks

In the future Internet it is likely that diverse service requirements will create a strongdemand for the ability to modify a network subsystem’s functionality, if possible at runtimeand in response to customisation needs. To date, proposals for dynamic tuning offunctionality have used various ad hoc techniques for cross-layer optimisation. Severalframeworks have also been proposed by researchers from the active networking community;these enable incremental extension of functionality. We believe that past work hasonly partially addressed the goal of functional composition. In this article we propose anintegrated system that is capable of functional adaptation in response to a variety of adaptationobjectives. We describe a prototype implementation of our system and an evaluationof the prototype.