Introducing Automation in Service Delivery Procedures

The combination of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) with Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) approaches is gaining momentum in the Industry as a new way of implementing, managing and controlling telecommunications networks. This chapter aims to go through SDN and lightly over NFV, presenting main characteristics and the standardization work on that technologies. SDN enables programming networks together with the ability to adapt to applications requirements and network dynamics. NFV aims at virtualizing network services by merging several network equipment types onto standard Information Technologies (IT) high volume virtualization technology (switches, servers and storage) located either in data centres, customer premises or network nodes. SDN and NFV interworking ambition is to bring on-demand resource provisioning, resource elasticity, among others with a centralized view of the overall network, able to automatically and dynamically honor service requirements.

The Whole World is Going Mobile

The Internet is growing ever more mobile – meaning, that an ever greater proportion of Internet devices are mobile devices. This trend necessitates new designs and will produce new and even unpredictable conceptions about the very nature of the Internet and, more fundamentally, the nature of social interaction. The engineering response to growing mobility and complexity is difficult to predict. This chapter summarizes the past and the present ways of dealing with mobility, and uses that as context for trying to understand what needs to be done for the future. Central to the conception of future mobility is the notion of “always available” and highly interactive applications. Part of providing acceptable service in that conception of the mobile Internet will require better ways to manage handovers as the device moves around the Internet, and ways to better either hide or make available a person's identity depending on who is asking.

Application-Enabled Collaborative Networking

Identification and treatment of application flows are important to many application providers and network operators. They often rely on these capabilities to deploy and/or support a wide range of applications. These applications generate flows that may have specific characteristics such as bandwidth or latency that can be met if made known to the network. Historically, this functionality has been implemented to the extent possible using heuristics that inspect and infer flow characteristics. Heuristics may be based on port numbers, network identifiers (e.g., subnets or VLANs, Deep Flow Inspection (DFI), or Deep Packet Inspection (DPI)). However, many application flows in current usages are dynamic, adaptive, time-bound, encrypted, peer-to-peer (P2P), asymmetric, used on multipurpose devices, and/ or have different priorities depending on the direction of the flow, user preferences, and other factors. Any combination of these properties renders heuristic-based techniques less effective and may result in compromises to application security or user privacy. Application-enabled collaborative networking (AECN) is a framework in which applications explicitly signal their flow characteristics and requirements to the network. This provides network nodes with knowledge of the application flow characteristics, which enables them to apply the correct flow treatment and provide feedback to applications accordingly. This chapter describes how an application enabled collaborative networking framework contributes to solve the encountered problems.

Internet Identity and the Right to be Forgotten

In this chapter, the analysis will focus on the concept of digital identity which is evolving and changing, based on the experiences that every individual lives. The chapter further highlights how the digital identity includes the fundamental human rights such as the right to a name, the right of reply, the right to protection of personal data and the right to an image. In translating the right to personal identity to our digitalized era, with its massive use of social networks, we have added to the related decalogue of rights the right to oblivion, equally called right to be forgotten. Given the complexity of the subject, the chapter develops an analysis of the actual international regulatory trends.

Service-Centric Networking

This chapter introduces a new paradigm for service centric networking. Building upon recent proposals in the area of information centric networking, a similar treatment of services – where networked software functions, rather than content, are dynamically deployed, replicated and invoked – is discussed. Service-centric networking provides the mechanisms required to deploy replicated service instances across highly distributed networked cloud infrastructures and to route client requests to the closest instance while providing more efficient network infrastructure usage, improved QoS and new business opportunities for application and service providers.

Recent Advances and Perspectives on Content Delivery Networks

This chapter provides an overview on the recent advances and perspectives on Content Delivery Networks. The first section, the introduction, sets the context. The second section identifies the different types of current CDNs and also insights on their evolution. The third section deals with CDN interconnection, reporting work status such as IETF and ETSI. The fourth section, on CDN and virtualization, describes the related initiatives in this area, in standardization bodies as well as in experimental deployments and evaluations. The fifth section focuses on the convergence of CDNs and clouds, presenting new business opportunities for the market players, as well as technical challenges. The sixth section addresses another trend, which is the extension of CDNs to home networking and terminal devices. The last section discusses content delivery for mobile, introducing solutions that operators can to optimize their networks and avoid being overwhelmed by ever growing traffic.

Context-Aware Content Delivery

The huge changes in multimedia and video consumption styles are leading to different challenges for the current Internet architecture in order to support the required quality of experience. A comprehensive solution to these would help the service providers and over-the-top players (OTT) to differentiate their services and the network operators to handle ever growing demands on network resources in an era of slower growth in revenues. This chapter discusses the requirements for and approaches to enhanced content delivery architectures, video delivery standards and current and future content transport mechanisms. The chapter also discusses the Quality of Experience (QoE) metrics and management for video content and introduces context-awareness in the video delivery chain. It also provides several examples for context-aware content delivery and personalized services.

Available Routing Construct (ARC)

Every computer network has been built in the last 30 years on the concept of routing tree to compute the path to be used to reach a given prefix or the border of a routing area. This chapter introduces the concept of Available Routing Construct (ARC), which is a two-end (or more) routing basic element that forms its own recovery domain. As it is dual ended, any failure in an ARC can be easily locally resolved by reversing the path toward the other end. A routing area can therefore be described in a graph of hierarchical ARCs. This new paradigm could be leveraged to improve the network resiliency and utilization for both unicast and multicast traffic.

Towards Privacy Awareness in Future Internet Technologies

With the increased use of the Internet to share confidential information with other users around the world, the demands to protect this information are also increasing. This is why, today, privacy has found its important place in users' lives. However, Internet users have different interpretations of the meaning of privacy. This fact makes it difficult to find the best way to address the privacy issue. In addition, most of the current standard protocols in use over the Internet do not support the level of privacy that most users expect. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the best balance between users' expectation and the practical level of privacy to address user privacy needs and evaluate the most important protocols from privacy aspects.

Future Networked Healthcare Systems

Future healthcare systems and organizations demand huge computational resources, and the ability for the applications to interact and communicate with each other, within and across organizational boundaries. This chapter aims to explore state-of-the-art of the healthcare landscape and presents an analysis of networked healthcare systems with a focus on networking traffic and architectures. To this end, the relevant technologies including networked healthcare architectures and performance studies, Health Level 7 (HL7), big data, and cloud computing, are reviewed. Subsequently, a study of healthcare systems, applications and traffic over local, metro, and wide area networks is presented using multi-hospital cross-continent scenarios. The network architectures for these systems are described. A detailed study to explore quality of service (QoS) performance for these healthcare systems with a range of applications, system sizes, and network sizes is presented. Conclusions are drawn regarding future healthcare systems and internet designs along with directions for future research.