Dissemination level: PU 2...Services [Gree07, Eric10, Rebb11], Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN)...

Grant Agreement Number : 216366

Project Acronym : Euro-NF

Project Title : Anticipating the Network of the Future

– From Theory to Design

Funding Scheme : Network of Excellence

Start Date of Project : 01 January, 2008

Duration : 54 months (originally 36 months)

Deliverable Number : D.SEA.10.1.3

Version Number : 1.0

Title of Deliverable : Final update of the Euro-NF vision

regarding the network of the future

Contractual Due Date : April, 2012

Actual Date of Completion : June, 2012

Workpackage contributing to the Deliverable : SEA 10.1 – Euro-NF Vision

Lead Contractor for this Deliverable : UNI WIEN (partner 04) and BTH (partner 11)

Editor{s} : Kurt Tutschku and Markus Fiedler

Nature of the Deliverable : (R/P/D/O)* R

Dissemination Level : (PU, PP, RE, CO)** PU

*Nature: R-report, P-prototype, D-demonstrator, O-other

**Dissemination: PU-public, PP-restricted to programme, RE- restricted to a group, CO-confidential

Project URL: http://www.euronf.org

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

http://www.euronf.org/

Project FP7 ICT N° 216366 – Euro-NF 8 June 2012

Deliverable N°: D.SEA.10.1.3

Dissemination level: PU 2

With contributions from the following partners:

Partner

Number

Partner

Acronym Contributor Name Contributor e-mail address

01 GET Daniel Kofman [email protected]

01 GET Jean-Paul Lefèvre [email protected]

04 UNI WIEN Kurt Tutschku [email protected]

10 UWUERZ Phuoc Tran Gia [email protected]

11 BTH Markus Fiedler [email protected]

13 AUEB-RC George Polyzos [email protected]

30 INESC-ID Augusto Casaca [email protected]

34 AU Wolfgang Kleinwächter [email protected]

FOREWORD:

The so-called Euro-NF vision is the result of a long-term continuous brainstorming initiated

during the former project Euro-NGI (a Network of Excellence supported by the European

Commission through FP6 between 2003 and 2012). An initial document [1] was produced in

May 2006, and then regularly discussed and updated until the release of the First Update [2]

in July 2009, followed by a Second Update [3] in December 2010, focusing on architectural

issues and (r-)evolutionary approaches. The present document can be seen as a snapshot of

the evolution of our views on how to extrapolate and anticipate future networking

technologies and challenges, rather than providing a detailed and technically exhaustive

vision. Thus, it has to be considered as complementary to its predecessors and is labelled with

a version date. Moreover, being extendable and adaptive to trends, which cannot currently be

foreseen, is a major feature of the Euro-NF vision and reflects also the Euro-NF ability to

address emerging networking issues in a very timely manner. On this background, merely

examples of future technological focus areas are provided.

[1] Euro-NGI Network of Excellence, FP6 Project N° 507613, Deliverable N°

D.WP.SEA.10.1.1, “A View on Future Communications”, May 2006, available at:

http://eurongi.enst.fr/p_en_Publicat_ngiview_366.html

[2] Euro-NF Network of Excellence, FP7 Grant Agreement N° 216366, Deliverable N°

D.SEA.10.1.1, “First Update of the Euro-NF Vision Regarding the Network of the

Future”, July 2009, available at: http://euronf.enst.fr/p_en_Publicat_ngiview_366.html

[3] Euro-NF Network of Excellence, FP7 Grant Agreement N° 216366, Deliverable N°

D.SEA.10.1.2, “Second Update of the Euro-NF Vision Regarding the Network of the

Future”, Dec. 2010, available at: http://euronf.enst.fr/p_en_Publicat_ngiview_366.html

http://eurongi.enst.fr/p_en_Publicat_ngiview_366.html

http://euronf.enst.fr/p_en_Publicat_ngiview_366.html

http://euronf.enst.fr/p_en_Publicat_ngiview_366.html




CONTENTS

1 THE FUTURE INTERNET – THE FOUNDATION FOR SMART

APPLICATIONS 4

2 THE NEED FOR A NEW COMPREHENSIVE RESEARCH AGENDA 6

3 THE eFIRA CONCEPT 8

4 TECHNOLOGIES AND SCIENTIFIC BACKGROUNDS ADDRESSED BY THE

eFIRA CONCEPT 9

5 THE TECHNOLOGIES ADDRESSED BY eFIRA 12

LITERATURE 17




eFIRA: A NEW RESEARCH AGENDA FOR THE

FUTURE INTERNET NETWORK MECHANISMS THAT

MASTER THE INFORMATION FLOWS BETWEEN

SMART APPLICATIONS AND NETWORKS

VERSION: June 8th

2012

1 THE FUTURE INTERNET – THE FOUNDATION

FOR SMART APPLICATIONS

Users will consider future networked systems as a web of smart applications, services

and content. The smartness of such applications is based on clever, intelligent, and almost

human-like combination of information and services. In this way, the future networked

systems will bring yet unforeseen benefits and values to stakeholders such as end users,

municipalities, governments, service providers, and network operators.

Contributions from the network itself to the smartness of future applications might range from

low to essential. The necessity for these contributions might depend on the needs of

stakeholders (e.g. users are typically not interested in network efficiency as operators do), on

the requirements of the applications and of course on the applied network technology. The

increased understanding and application of newly developed network paradigms and design

patters, such as Network Virtualization [And05, Rixn08], Network Federation [Spyr07,

Tuts10], Software-defined Networking (SDN) [McKe09, Gree09, Stae11], Service-Oriented

Network Architecture [Khon10, Müll08], Cloud Computing [Hwan11], Over-the-Top (OTT)

Services [Gree07, Eric10, Rebb11], Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) [Fall03], or Ad-hoc

and Wireless Mesh Networks [Muth04, Zhen09], however, asks for new and comprehensive

knowledge in order to understand how networks and applications can collaborate for

creating smart features of future applications. To achieve this knowledge, to enhance

today’s and to develop future networking mechanisms we need a new research agenda for

the Future Internet, which we call the agenda the European Future Internet Research

Agenda: eFIRA.

Amongst others, the important questions of the Future Internet research agenda are, whether

the end-to-end (E2E) principle of today’s Internet [Salt84] will still be the governing

networking architecture of the future or how should it be enhanced? eFIRA assumes that the

highly successful E2E design pattern is challenged by new technologies, e.g. by DTN and

SDN, as well as by economical needs, e.g. how will OTT services cover the costs of the data

transport infrastructure? The complexity of this discussion is highlighted by the typical

misperception of the E2E principle as the “dumb network, smart end-systems” concept that

might imply a strong separation of networks and applications. The original E2E paper makes

a more subtle statement, claiming nothing more but that correctly implemented solutions for

data transport can only be achieved by the support from end points. Thus, the original E2E

paper explicitly did not exclude network-based mechanisms for enhancing the performance of

data transport control, cf. [Salt84, Davi09].




The discussion above reveals also that the locations of control functions are essential for the

overall efficiency of the data exchange, i.e. for the collaboration of applications and networks,

or between application and network layer control mechanisms respectively. Thus, semantics,

content and processing of information flows determine the performance of current

networks and applications and of course of future applications.

The Euro-NF project understands by “information flows” the generic term for data flows of

user data or of signalling information. Furthermore, the Euro-NF NoE distinguishes between

“data information flows” and “network information flows”. Data information flows are those

actual data flows in the typical data plane, or its equivalents. The “network information

flows” are flows of any kind of signalling information but also any flow of information about

involved networks, their capabilities regarding data transport, and related boundary

conditions. In particular, the Euro-NF project assumes that network support for smart

applications needs to clearly understand the direct/indirect and explicit/implicit network

information flows and their semantics. Hence, it is necessary to model the flows with

appropriate scope and level of detail. More details on the modelling concepts and their

semantics will be outlined in Section 5.

The above outlined brief analysis leads to the definition of the three key hypotheses of

eFIRA for main topics of Future Internet research:

a) The handling of “network information flows” becomes as important as handling

the “data information flows”; and

b) The new networking paradigms have more complex information flows than design

patterns using the current layering architectures, in particular the ISO/OSI model and

the TCP/IP reference architecture, cf. [Day08]. Thus, they require new methods,

procedures, mechanisms, protocols and architecture for processing the

information flows in networked systems; and

c) The new software architectures of the Future Internet core allows for these new

kinds of processing of information flows.

Thus, the main target of eFIRA should be:

to establish an understanding of the information flows in current and future

network paradigms and design patterns in a more comprehensive way than today,

as an enabling basis for future smart applications.

The deeper knowledge in this area will lead to

the design of new networking architectures, protocols, standards and mechanisms

for mastering these information flows between smart applications and networks,

and

the development of new methods to design, evaluate and validate these new

networking techniques.




2 THE NEED FOR A NEW COMPREHENSIVE

RESEARCH AGENDA

In addition to the technology challenges above outlined, one can observe that networked

systems are increasingly impacted by disruptive technology changes at fast pace and with

decreasing predictability. Examples for such changes are the rise and fall of P2P content

distribution [Azzo03, Kara04], the current dominance of HTTP-based streaming [BBC11] or

the recent success of smartphone platforms [benA10, Chon10].

The trend of disruptive changes is largely founded in the complex relationships in ICT

systems. Game changing concepts, like single technology quantum leaps such as high

capacity optical transmission [Mori11, Sano11] or intelligent mesh-ups of technologies

[Bloo10], might immediately impact the interplay of components and thus the functionality of

ICT systems. In the end, local or small changes may lead to surprising innovations by the

system.

This trend is expected to even accelerate in the future, since ICT systems are becoming

more complex and more integrated into daily life. Furthermore, the trend challenges the

conventional concepts for researching networked systems. Conventional research strategies

are typically based on long-term strategies, whereas the recent innovations have happened

frequently and on short-term. As a result,

new approaches for research strategies in this domain are needed, that are able to

adapt quickly to new technologies or technology mesh-ups.

The core assumption of Euro-NF project for eFIRA is that an adaptive approach is required

for the investigation of future complex networked systems. In particular,

a research agenda is needed that can adapt and react quickly to emerging

networking technologies and technology mesh-ups.

The complexity and diversity of networked systems requires interdisciplinary and

competitive research for obtaining comprehensive solutions. Solutions of singular problems

in networked systems, such as the integration of new physical layers, are difficult and require

high amounts of work, but the results can typically be achieved since the solution space is

determined. Solutions of deep and comprehensive problems, however, are more difficult since

the solution space is virtually unlimited. Such comprehensive solutions often need the

comparison of different kinds of solutions to address a problem completely. Comprehensive

problems, however, arise promptly in complex networked systems. A very illustrative

example might be the feature of “resilience” or “reliability” in networked systems. P2P files

sharing systems [Tuts08] and routing overlays [Ande01] have demonstrated that application-

specific resilience or reliability can easily be implemented in the application layer. P2P

reliability mechanisms outperform even mechanisms on network layer [Tuts08]. Thus, an

important question is where to locate these resilience/reliability functions at best for a specific

application? Hence experts of network layer and application layer have to compete with their

investigation or to discuss how the different resilience concepts that complement or cooperate

with each other. Such




complementing and competitive investigations can only be performed in the

collaborative research agenda, where different teams compare different solutions

using their different experiences and research methodologies.

Furthermore, the investigations of networking concepts for future smart applications require a

multidisciplinary research approach that will involve experts from the domains of applications

and networks. The research agenda for the Future Internet should address this requirement by

including complementing teams from both domains. In this way,

the eFIRA agenda might achieve new forms for integration of networks and

applications which consider the system as a whole, i.e. eFIRA-based research can

address the application and the network requirements jointly.

Thus, the eFIRA concept enables the finding of trade-offs between partial solutions and it

avoids isolated solutions that might be replaced quickly, such as specific physical networks

for specific applications that do not last long.

In addition, by the comparison of solutions and methods from different areas,

the eFIRA concept will lead to the development of integrated methodologies for the

collaboration of networks and applications.

By the approach of integrated Future Internet research,

the eFIRA concept might produce quickly results on the identification of network

and service requirements by future smart applications,

and thus,

the eFIRA knowledge will pave the way for the economical exploitation of future

smart applications by the European Internet economy and their stakeholders, i.e.

users, software developers, services providers, or network operators.

Furthermore, the structured knowledge obtained in the eFIRA agenda can be considered as

results of pre-standardization work, which means that

eFIRA concept is able to feed its knowledge to standardization processes for

network technology for future smart applications, for example by initiating

workshops and seminars in conjunction with standardization bodies such as ETSI.

All in all,

the eFIRA concept for Future Internet research implements a highly dynamic,

flexible, adaptive, interdisciplinary, complementing and competitive research

approach to generate new knowledge for the collaboration of networks and smart

application and for understanding the information flows among them.

a future eFIRA concept should gathers a focused group of major European

research major institutions in the domains of networking and networked

applications to develop future networking mechanisms, evaluation models and

methods for future smart application.




3 THE eFIRA CONCEPT

The eFIRA agenda aims at a systematic design and engineering approach that considers

networks and applications as a whole. Thus, the research work integrated by eFIRA will

address networking hardware and software, but also the needs of applications, users and

stake-holders such as personal usage, societal and business impacts, or ecological constraints.

Moreover, the eFIRA approach aims at not only providing foundations for research on future

networks for smart applications, but also at engineering of systems to become operable in

real-world environments. These aims lead to the question, how can such a systematic

research and engineering approach for mastering information flows between smart

applications and networks be facilitated?

In order to enable a new systematic design paradigm for mastering the information flow

between smart applications and networks, the eFIRA agenda assumes that the Dijkstra

paradigm of the separation of concerns, cf. [Dijk82], has to be re-applied to the design

pattern [Day08] and building blocks of future systems as well as to the design methodologies

for networks and smart applications. We suggest that the usage and technology areas can be

separated in three areas of concern for usage and technology, cf. Figure 1:

Future smart applications (such as future environmental sensing networks or future

intelligent transportation systems, cf. Section 4 below);

Future smart mediation techniques (such as former routing tasks, now enabling

mediation for Publish/Subscribe techniques, delay-tolerant networking, application-

specific topologies and resource management);

Future smart connectivity techniques (such as convergence of high speed optical and

wireless transmission and energy efficient transmission techniques).

The separation of design methodologies for future networks has to be changed in the light of

the new requirements from smart applications in order to facilitate a coherent systematics and

the holistic nature of the design. Such a separation might divide the design methods into:

New design methods for networking architectures, e.g. which separation is appropriate

(e.g. layering vs. heaps);

New methods for comparing and evaluating architectures, e.g. for comparing different

Future Internet architectures in term of new qualitative (e.g. flexibility, adaptivity, or

expandability) and quantitative metrics (e.g. the quality of cooperation, quality of

pricing, quality of protection);

New design methods for smart algorithms (e.g. models for self-organization, smartness

and autonomy);

New design methods for including socio-economic needs in future networks, e.g. for

assessment of reliability, resource efficiency, security and Quality of Experience, or

methods for incorporating network and application governance concepts as well as

business models into network mechanisms.




Future Smart Application

Future Smart Mediation

Future Smart Connectivity

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Figure 1 - eFIRA’s conceptual matrix for interconnecting technologies for

smart applications with networks with the appropriate design methods

Thus, the concept of the research and integration work of the eFIRA agenda is to weave a

new fabric for combining future technologies and new design methods for mastering the

information flows between smart applications and networks. A first definition of the

threads of this fabric is given by rough and generic specification of the new areas of the

separations given above. These threads do not exclude an evolution of today’s successful

network paradigms such as the E2E concept. These threads will contribute to a new

understanding of the separation of concerns.

Technically, the weaving of the fabric is materialized by enablers, which are physical

entities and mechanisms or intellectual methods and algorithms for the coordinated operation

of future networks and future smart applications. In particular, the methodologies to achieve

smart combinations of future networking and application technologies for supporting smart

applications are at the core of the eFIRA concept.

4 TECHNOLOGIES AND SCIENTIFIC BACKGROUNDS

ADDRESSED BY THE eFIRA CONCEPT

The eFIRA agenda expects that the main usage domains of smart applications are within

everyday life. Examples domains are health services; energy usage and distribution;

environmental sensing, monitoring and analysis; logistics and transportation; and personal

entertainment, [EC09]. The embedding of future smart applications in daily life will provide a

basis for reinforced social, economical and ecological stability, as required by internationals

societies such as the European Commission [EC10a, EC10b]. The embedding makes the

smart applications a true commodity for everyone.

However, being a commodity increases the implicit and explicit requirements on applications

and networks, such a dependability, safety, privacy, security, ease-of-use, ease-of-operation,

efficiency, or performance. A comprehensive description of the requirements of future smart

applications however, is that at this point of time practically not feasible and perhaps even not

advised. The major difficulty is that future applications and thus their requirements are very

difficult to predict. The eFIRA approach to resolve this deadlock is to establish strong

collaborations with users and industry to identify future smart applications, identify their

requirements, spread this knowledge, and develop network mechanisms based on this




knowledge. However, in order to understand current main requirements from future or smart

applications, two examples of them are outlined next.

Future environmental sensing networks are a first example. They permit applications from

accurate, local weather forecasts for farming to live, worldwide maps of diseases and human

wellness. A successful illustration for them is the ViSE (Virtualized Sensing Environment)

project at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst, cf. [Kuro08]. It has demonstrated how

to provide access to controllable virtualized sensors, e.g. steerable radars and Pan-Tilt-Zoom

video cameras, which export rich actuation capabilities and high-bandwidth data. ViSE

demonstrated also the federation of local sensors with the national, large-scale GENI test

facility for permitting end-users and researchers end-to-end control for sensor experiments

and applications. Such sensing applications might not be limited to environmental

applications. They also can be in industrial environments for remote control of manufacturing

processes, cf. [SSSC11].

Such sensing applications combine in an intelligent way distributed high-volume data sources

(e.g. HD radar images or weather webcams), small volume but large-scale sensor information

(e.g. temperature), and real-time requirements for actuator control with smart information

processing. The example of sensing networks also outlines that information processing will

take place at very diverse locations. The range of architecture options for processing varies

from highly centralized to extremely distributed, as in peer-to-peer computing. Integrating

very different types of data sources with highly diverse quality-of-service requirements for

data transport is an extremely challenging task in today’s networks. Solving this task for

future network and smart application is challenging task.

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) using Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs)

are becoming a reality. ITS is a key topic for both the research community and the industry,

including vehicle manufacturers and the information technology industry. In particular,

VANETS that are enhanced by DTN concepts and termed as Vehicular Delay-Tolerant

Networks (VDTNs) envision the capabilities of the support of networks for smart

applications. They may implement in short time services that have been proposed already for

a long time, for example: safety applications, such as collision avoidance, hard-break

notifications or even road condition information; information applications that can provide

data dissemination to determine, for example, the best routes to decrease traffic congestion; or

traffic light control. On another side, an efficient planning of these systems, with fixed or

mobile stations giving support to vehicular networks, in a hierarchical approach, may envision

the support of entertainment applications, namely content distribution related to

advertisement, video streaming and even multi-player games between passengers. A key

project in this area is the Drive-In VANET project, cf. [Barr09]. The goal of DRIVE-IN

project is to investigate how vehicle-to-vehicle communication can improve the user

experience and the overall efficiency of vehicle and road utilization. In the future, however,

such networks will be operated not as isolated, single purpose network islands. They rather

will be opened to multiple applications and will be integrated and interworking with other

communication networks.

Summarizing the above given examples, an initial characterization of major data,

processing and communication features for future smart applications can be given.

Future smart applications are characterized by:




using very different types of data, e.g. from very low volume sensor data to interactive

video streams and actuator information with strict real-time requirements or very high

data volumes;

flexibility, elasticity and adaptation in the use of processing resources in order to

implement arbitrary workflows on data, content and services, e.g. permit seamless

transition between centralized processing (cloud, client-server) and peer-to-peer

computing;

the use of very different transmission modes for data, even the use of them in parallel

(yet any mix of intermittent and delay tolerant, multi-hop mesh, packet- and circuit-

switched transmission modes is permitted);

being agnostic whether wireless, mobile or wired connections are used;

being able to interact with infrastructure for improved data collection/content

distribution;

smart provider and connectivity selection (e.g. based on economic and ecological

needs);

machine-to-machine communication that requires highly scalable and stable

mechanisms (up to billions of communicating devices);

the use of application-specific virtual network, with own topologies, naming schemes,

and routing and resource management techniques, that can be embedded in more

general network infrastructures;

highly autonomous operation for reduced human interaction in processing and the

operational loop;

considering the system as whole, i.e. being able to integrate multi-disciplinary

approaches for information processing and data communication;

being easily able to addresses the different socio-economic interests of the different

stake-holders in the ecosystem of networked applications.

Finally, future smart applications have to fulfil of course long-time desired performance

features, such as being highly reliable and assuring transmission quality. The absence of the

latter features in today’s network increases even further the expectations and the pressure on

the future systems for being novel and smart.




5 THE TECHNOLOGIES ADDRESSED BY eFIRA

The eFIRA agenda assumes that the support of future smart applications rely closely on the

availability and combination of new and even old network paradigms, cf. Section 1. The

integration of the paradigms into future applications is achieved by designing of the future

Internet core as a new software architecture with variable and adaptive capabilities for

information flow processing.

The evolution of information flows in network architectures is outlined in Figure 2. Figure

2(a) depicts the ideal layer concept of ISO/OSI reference model [Zimm01]. This well-known

model assumes a linear, vertical information flow between adjacent layers with predefined

information processing at the layers according to the functions provided by them. Figure 2(b)

indicates the growth of functionality in certain layers in the TCP/IP reference model [Brad89].

This growth leads to the overload of IP layer, denoted as the “fat waist” this architecture

[Deer01, Auir08]. However, the vertical data information flow is still maintained in the

TCP/IP model. Recently, an analytical model was provided [Akhs11] that explains why a

layered protocol stack evolves to a hourglass-shaped architectures as depicted in Figure 2(c).

The model also outlines that alternative protocols dependencies and the related adaption of

the processing of flows might lead to network architectures with higher efficiency. The new

separation of concerns from Section 1 is shown in Figure 2(d). This separation leads to

distinguish responsibilities for creating, maintaining, and providing services in an architecture

for networked systems. The architecture considers the domains of “Application” (representing

applications or re-useable services), “Mediation” (mapping of application demands to

transport capabilities), and “Connectivity” (represent services to related transport

technologies), cf. [Tuts07, Tuts08, Müll11].

Connectivity

Mediation

Application

EuroView Architecture

(2007)

Application

Presentation

Session

Transport

Network

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Physical

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Figure 2 - Evolutions of Networking Architecture

While the architecture of Figure 2(d) is rather generic and might allow for non-linear

information flow between layers, the information flow graph architecture in Figure 2(e)

relaxes this requirement. It allows for adaptive, dynamic and non-linear workflows in the

processing of information flows. This dynamic and adaptation feature can be derived from the

concept of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA)1, cf. [Müll11]. eFIRA will validate the

assumption whether such dynamically interacting services might be able to replace the

concept of layers.

1 However, the SOA concept should not be set equal to Web Services. We consider SOA as an approach to

design computing systems, while Web Services is a technology to implement such systems.




Moreover, the control and management of data information flows is not of sole importance.

The handling of information about the network, its state and the quality of the data

transport is significant for smart applications. Accessing and processing of such network

information enables smart applications to operate truly smart. User data information and

network information can be combined and the application can consider the status of the

system as a whole. The simplest example of such a holistic concept is the knowledge of

connectivity options for the current context of an application. The application may select the

most reliable, cheapest or most ecological connectivity. However, the smart handling of

network information requires a more complex information flow processing.

More evolved and complex application and network scenarios have emerged recently that

require the combined processing of application data and network information flows. Such scenarios, for example, may comprise the use of cognitive radio technology for sensor

networks or the application of polymorphic, virtualized or federated networks for providing

new cloud services. In these scenarios, the semantic of network information has to be

understood and modelled in sufficient detail. These models might comprise complex models

for network topologies, network behaviour, resource availability, or for relating Quality-of-

Service with Quality-of-Experience. Moreover, the understanding of application and network

information may also require the use W3C’s semantic web techniques like Resource

Description Framework (RDF), RDF schema (RDFS), or Web Ontology Language (OWL)

for improved semantic descriptions and analysis. In addition, more complex matching

mechanisms are needed for comparing the current and required state of a network system and

to make appropriate making decisions for routing, flow or overload control.

Network information can easily be communicated directly between applications and

networks when the information is of Boolean type, e.g. access is granted by the network to a

resource. Many signalling protocols and architectures achieve such a direct communication in

an elegant and highly efficiently way. Major examples for such signalling systems are SIP or

IMS. Indirect exchange of network information between networks and applications is

also often used. The TCP protocol can be consider as a prominent example. Here, the

network indicates (i.e. “signals”) overload indirectly to the application-oriented TCP transport

protocol by dropping packet. Upon recognition of the packet loss, TCP protocol may then

perform an adaptation of the window size. Figure 3 outlines the data information flows

between data producer and data consumer and summarizes the ways of direct and indirect

communication of network information. The eFIRA agenda assumes that the mapping of

the processing location of the data and network information flows is flexible.

In addition, the recent success of P2P-based file sharing and HTTP-based streaming have

demonstrated that application-layer transport control mechanisms (source/P2P selection, flow

and congestion control on application layer) which use indirectly network information, e.g.

peer quality, may perform equally or even superior to conventional transport layer control

mechanisms. However, these application-layer mechanisms may increase the decoupling of

applications from networks. Although the decoupling might be a design paradigm and an aim

for network architectures, little research work has been carried out a) to understand how

the above outlined complex applications perform indirect or direct interaction with of

the data transport mechanisms on the various levels or b) to understand where to place

these information flow control mechanisms most efficiently. Conventional approaches of

cross-layer optimization might often also proof inappropriate to the complexity of the

scenarios.




More technical solutions for the “smart” mastering of information flows have emerged recent

lately. However, an exhaustive and structured description of them can’t yet be achieved since

this knowledge is yet missing. It is major aim of the eFIRA agenda is to achieve a

classification of the concepts and to provide methodologies of how to combine them

efficiently. Another prominent example are middleboxes in mobile networks, cf. [Wang11].

Figure 3 - Data Information and Network Information Flows

These boxes perform in addition to security and NAT (Network Address Translation)

functions, tasks like TCP state tracking, response filtering or packet mangling for influencing

jointly the behaviour of networks and applications. Another recent result of relating the

applications and networks was the identification of functional relationships between

application-orient Quality-of-Experience (QoE) and network-oriented Quality-of-Service

(QoS) performance metrics. The IQX hypothesis for an exponential dependency of QoE and

QoS was validated in [Fied10]. Network Virtualization (NV) and Network Federation (NF)

can also achieve co-operation of future networks and applications [Tuts09, Tuts10]. NV aims

at the definition and concurrent operation of application-specific networks with own topology,

naming schemes, routing and resource management. NV permit the parallel operation of

multiple achieves in a single physical infrastructure and, thus, a vertical integration of

networks. NF aims at the collaboration of sub-networks, which are willing to achieve the

applications requirements. Currently, the collaboration of the network in the Internet is

achieved by the BGP protocol. However, this protocol has to be reconsidered and eventually

enhanced for future networks [Agap11].

However, a comprehensive understanding of these mechanisms in the light of today’s and

future networks and applications hasn’t yet been achieved. The current solutions of handling

data or network information flows are rather isolated. Their efficiency is often not

investigated in the context of future applications. Thus, eFIRA is aiming at a comprehensive

understanding, combination and processing of application data flows and network information

flows. eFIRA targets at new mechanisms and techniques for mastering the information

flow between smart applications and networks.

Smart applications will have higher chances of success if the new network architecture

allows locating, customizing, reserving, provisioning and monitoring network resources

in a smart, coherent and comprehensive way. To this end, the network architecture has to

be built having such functionalities and concerns in mind in order to provide enhanced




control, monitoring and measurement planes that can be easily supported, easily extended

(e.g. in response to technology shifts) and seamlessly integrated to effectively close the

measurement-optimization-control cycle.

In this way, the eFIRA agenda might weave a new fabric of interconnections of application

and networks and might answer the question, whether today’s and future network

architecture are smart enough for future smart applications?

The research work in eFIRA should aim at the investigation of the following list of focus

areas:

1) Virtualization and Federation for Polymorphic Networks

Smart applications and services demand for well-adapted network infrastructures.

Consequently, we observe a growing degree of polymorphism in NF, offering many different

possibilities to allocate and integrate network resources. Network Virtualization [Ande05,

Rixn08] enables the parallel operation (respectively consolidation) of multiple and possibly

application specific networks in a single physical system and enables vertical integration.

Network Federation aims at the combination of willingly cooperating network resources, also

denoted as stitching [Falk10, Moti08], and is thus achieving horizontal convergence of

diverse technical or administrative domains. The successful implementation of virtualization

and federation builds upon performance classification of resources and quantification of their

interaction as a basis for design and management of virtualized and stitched solutions.

2) Cooperative Algorithms for Seamless Wired and Wireless Connectivity

A typical end user disposes of a set of network accesses. Seamless switches between mobile,

wireless and wired technologies and operators, augmented by new communication paradigms

such as mesh networks and cognitive radio has opened a tremendous choice of possibilities to

make smart applications and services and thus users “Always Best Connected” (ABC)

[Gust03]. However, this plethora of choices is a mixed blessing, as the meaning of “best”

depends to a significant extent on content and context. Local, remote and cross-layer

information need to be combined in order to yield optimal decisions, which means that the

corresponding algorithms need to act in a distributed, cooperative way upon knowledge and

comparison of static and dynamic characteristics of alternatives, thus enabling user-centric

ABC [PERI10].

3) Engineering for Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber physical systems combine computing and networking power with physical components

[Lee08]. Thus, they can be seen as a materialization of the Internet of Things paradigm in a

wide range of domains, including robotics; smart homes, vehicles, and buildings; medical

implants; and future-generation sensor networks. The efficient design and operation of such

systems requires a clear view of the characteristics of the components and devices and their

interplay, given the specific conditions under which the systems operate. Thus, modelling of

components and their communication, and analysis and synthesis of information flows are of

key importance in order to enable reliable and secure functioning.

4) Design and Performance of Network-located Enablers for Smart Applications

We observe a growing diversity and multitude of network-located services (e.g. web,

authentication, location, or billing but also routing-as-a-service or data fusion services) and

specific entities (e.g. gateways, firewalls or cloud facilities). Intended as enablers for smart

applications and services, they can easily turn into disablers when facing performance




problems, e.g. due to untimely reactions. Already the design part of these enablers, which

includes definitions of architecture, roles, communication, etc., needs to carefully take care of

the specific requirements of smart applications and services in order to proactively fight

availability, reliability, performance and security issues. This requires a clear view on the

impact of different design options, to be obtained from performance experience, experiments,

studies and analyses. On the other hand, suitable control interfaces between enabler and

applications need to be designed and deployed. Successful design needs to be accomplished

by effective operations of the enablers, which includes appropriate reactions upon requests

and carefully synthesized control loops.

5) Cyber Assurance

Smart application and services must perform in a reliable and secure way in order to become

accepted for mission-critical tasks, for which current “one-size-fits-all” Internet never had

been designed. On the other hand, “smart” devices and applications have frequently shown

their capability to overload network resources and to open the door to adversaries, with

unsatisfactory user experience and performance or even economic damage as consequence.

Obviously, a reliable functional mapping between user experience and network and service

design and operation needs to be established. Such knowledge – preferably in form of generic

and quantitative relationships between network, system and user performance and security –

has to be advanced and disseminated in order to successfully guide the whole life cycle of

applications, services and resources.

6) Multi-stakeholder approaches to governance in Networks of the Future

So far, Internet governance (e.g. address assignment) has been dominated by a comparably

small set of players, with concentration to the “birthplace” of Internet. This dominance is

questioned by emerging stakeholders. For smart applications as well as for the Internet of

Things, there is a fierce debate of which players shall be involved in setting the rules, which

in particular refers to the Object Name System (ONS). Thinking of the plethora of issues

related to addressing, accessibility, security and performance within smart applications and

the polymorphic NF, there is a need to include multiple stakeholders such as manufacturers,

policy makers and user organizations in the corresponding decision-making according to their

place in the polymorphic network landscape.

7) Networking for sustainable energy use and sustainable energy use in networks

It is claimed that ICT stands for 2 % of the carbon footprint [Gart2007]. The new trend in

networking is “energy saving is in, over-provisioning is out”. It is expected that smart

applications and services will enable energy savings in an energy-efficient way. The study

[Eura08] mentions a potential of 15 % carbon savings until 2020, and it is challenging for

future smart applications, services and networks to even improve this percentage. In order to

yield such savings, ICT architectures in general and smart applications in specific, have to

come closer to energy producers and consumers, both physically and logically. Energy

spending for energy saving is a compromise in itself, which highlights the demand for energy

consumption models, related to cost and performance models, and the corresponding

assessment and optimization methods.




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