The Future Service Oriented Networks (FUSION) project will develop a new networking architecture designed to natively support efficient provisioning, discovery and execution of service components distributed over the network. Today's cloud computing architectures are centralised and network-agnostic. This makes them unfit for geographically distributed services with tight QoS-constraints and high bandwidth and computation demands. FUSION will develop an architecture allowing combined service instantiation and network routing at a fine granularity. Dynamic instantiation of services close to the consumers will naturally adapt to variations in demand. The project tackles the problem by integrating service provisioning and service-centric networking. An important dimension will be to define lightweight interactions between the two layers for efficient cooperation without overburdening the network layer with service-specific logic.The service instance placement problem can be formalised as provisioning service component instantiation points, given the location and capabilities of infrastructure, varying demand patterns and the QoS requirements of the service. Moreover, when service components are replicated, native network support will facilitate the creation of new instances associated with a given user or session. The key challenge of service-aware networking is the routing and load-balancing of service requests to the best instances with minimal impact on the routing information tables, given the existence of many different potential service instantiation points in the network. To support dynamic service instantiation, the project will also design lightweight component-based virtualisation technology with reliable isolation properties, as well as service description and orchestration languages that can be used to describe an application in terms of service components and interactions.