Updated Taxonomy for the Network and Service Management Research Field
Abstract
Network and service management is an established research field within
the general area of computer networks. A few years ago, an initial taxonomy, organizing
a comprehensive list of terms and topics, was established through interviews
with experts from both industry and academia. This taxonomy has since been used
to better partition standardization e↵orts, identify classes of managed objects and
improve the assignment of reviewers to papers submitted in the field. Because the
field of network and service management is rapidly evolving, a biyearly update of
the taxonomy was proposed. In this paper, a large-scale questionnaire is presented
which was answered by experts in the field, evaluating the relevance of each individual
topic for the next five years. Missing topics, which are likely to become
relevant over the next few years, are identified as well. Furthermore, an analysis
is performed of the records of papers submitted to major conferences in the area.
Based on the obtained results, an updated version of the taxonomy is proposed.