The Internet, at large, remains under the control of service providers and
autonomous systems. The Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing provide an
increasing demand and potential for more user control for their web service
workflows. Network Softwarization revolutionizes the network landscape in
various stages, from building, incrementally deploying, and maintaining the
environment. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions
Virtualization (NFV) are two core tenets of network softwarization. SDN offers
a logically centralized control plane by abstracting away the control of the
network devices in the data plane. NFV virtualizes dedicated hardware
middleboxes and deploys them on top of servers and data centers as network
functions. Thus, network softwarization enables efficient management of the
system by enhancing its control and improving the reusability of the network
services. In this work, we propose our vision for a Software-Defined Internet
(SDI) for latency-sensitive web service workflows. SDI extends network
softwarization to the Internet-scale, to enable a latency-aware user workflow
execution on the Internet.Comment: Accepted for Publication at The Seventh International Conference on
Software Defined Systems (SDS-2020