The first step towards distribution is the ability to support service contracts for the network or networks used to interconnect the different processing nodes in the system. Similar to the core FSF module, the contracts on the network allow the application to specify its minimum utilization (bandwidth) requirements, so that the implementation can make guarantees or reservations for that minimum utilization. We use the same contract that is used for processing nodes, and thus the core attributes for distribution are the same as for the core FSF, described in Table 1, with the addition of the network id attribute (see Table 5), that identifies the contract as a network contract for the specified network. The default value for the network id is null, which means that the contract applies to the processing node where the contact is negotiated.