A method and apparatus for providing network dependent application services is provided. In accordance with one embodiment of the invention, a first group of one or more application service contracts specifying subscriptions to one or more application services are provided to a community of one or more subscriber application routers (SAR) by a first application service Provider. One or more application delivery transports are then automatically provisioned in accordance with the one or more application service contracts, and selected ones of the application services are delivered through selected ones of said application delivery transports.
RELATED APPLICATIONS
This application is a non-provisional application of the earlier filed provisional application No. 60/228,128, filed on Aug. 25, 2000, and claims priority to the earlier filed '128 provisional application, whose specification is hereby fully incorporated by reference.
A system, including apparatuses and methods, for operating a subscription-based virtual computing services provider and for providing virtual computing services to subscribers thereto. The services provider enrolls subscribers to receive subscriber-selectable virtual computing services and provides such services to subscribers in exchange for the payment of a subscription fee based, at least in part, on the particularly selected computing services. The virtual computing services are provided through a communication network and accessible via subscriber devices having different degrees of robustness and via subscriber-selected user interfaces. A virtual non-volatile storage is allocated to each subscriber in a subscriber-selected storage capacity. The virtual non-volatile storage may be used for the storage and execution of software applications therein and/or for the storage of uploadable or downloadable data therein. Subscribers may configure their virtual non-volatile storage with a subscriber-selected operating system and/or software application(s) that may be provided and maintained by the services provider.
Data communication is carried out between nodes each not having a global address. In a network management system in which a first network and a second network which have the different address systems are connected to each other through an address translator, each of the first and second networks has a node and a management protocol proxy; and each of the management protocol proxies includes a management protocol proxy data generating unit for treating, as management protocol proxy data, a transmission source address, a transmission destination address and data in a protocol data unit which are contained in a packet of a management protocol sent from the associated one of the nodes, and an address translation unit for translating the address information in the protocol data unit contained in the management protocol proxy data sent from the other management protocol proxy.
A technique for resource distribution using an auto-discovery mechanism for Provider-Provisioned Layer-2 and Layer-3 Virtual Private Networks. In one particular exemplary embodiment, the technique may be realized by a method for establishing a Virtual Private Network (VPN) tunnel between a first provider edge (PE) device and a second (PE) device of a provider-provisioned VPN. The method may comprise advertising at least one tunnel-based parameter to one or more PE devices over a network backbone using an auto-discovery mechanism, the one or more PE devices including at least one of the first and second PE devices. The method further may comprise configuring a VPN tunnel between the first and second PE devices based at least in part on the at least one tunnel-based parameter.
