The Future Internet

The Internet has seen a strong move to support overlay applications, which demand a coherent and integrated control in underlying heterogeneous networks in a scalable, resilient, and energy-efficient manner. A tighter integration of network management and overlay service functionality can lead to cross-layer optimization of operations and management, which is a promising approach as it offers a large business potential in operational perspectives for all players involved. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to present SmartenIT (Socially-aware Management of New Overlay Application Traffic combined with Energy Efficiency in the Internet), which targets at an incentive-compatible cross-layer network management for providers of overlay-based application (

e.g.

, cloud applications, content delivery, and social networks), network providers, and end-users. The goal is to ensure a QoE-awareness, by addressing accordingly load and traffic patterns or special application requirements, and exploiting at the same time social awareness (in terms of user relations and interests). Moreover, energy efficiency with respect to both end-user devices and underlying networking infrastructure is tackled to ensure an operationally efficient management. Incentive-compatible network management mechanisms for improving metrics on an inter-domain basis for ISPs serve as the major mechanism to deal with and investigate real-life scenarios.

The NEBULA Future Internet Architecture (FIA) project is focused on a future network that enables the vision of cloud computing [8,12] to be realized. With computation and storage moving to data centers, networking to these data centers must be several orders of magnitude more resilient for some applications to trust cloud computing and enable their move to the cloud.

Advancements concerning research and development of Future Networks (FNs) technologies have been introduced in recent years, such as network virtualization and software defined/driven network (SDN), information centric networking (ICN), cloud networking, autonomic management, and open connectivity. In this context ITU-T has developed initial Recommendations that lay out the essential directions for subsequent detailed work including further standardization of Future Networks. This paper presents the background and the context of FNs’ standardization, the results and future plans originated from the initial standardization work performed by ITU-T.

The question of whether there exists a minimal model for

information-centric networking

(ICN), that allows the bulk of features of various recent ICN architectures to be expressed as independent extensions to the model, is largely unexplored. Finding such

core

would yield more orthogonality of the features, better adaptability to the changing multi-stakeholder environment of the Internet, and improved interoperability between ICN architectures.

In this paper, we introduce the concept of

information space

as a potential solution, which is based on the sharing of information and late binding service composition of decoupled entities as the essence of information-centrism. The specified framework is an abstract model without dependencies to low-level implementation details and achieves minimality by leaving naming and content security outside the core. This approach makes the experimentation of new features above and their implementation below faster and provides a possible evolutionary kernel for ICN.

The integration of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in the Future Internet has opened new opportunities for novel applications that meet the needs of modern societies. Virtualisation of the available resources and the services offered by WSNs enables their efficient sharing between diverse applications reducing costs. Responding to this challenge, the VITRO project has designed a WSN virtualization architecture that targets to decouple the physical sensor infrastructure from the applications running on top of it. In the concept of Virtual Sensor Network platform, the WSNs are capable of collaborating among each other (even if they belong to different administrator domains or comprise of heterogeneous platforms) to flexibly support service composition and fuel novel application development. To meet the diverse Quality of Service (QoS) requirements imposed by the different applications running on top of the same infrastructure, VITRO has designed, implemented and integrated a routing solution that enables the establishment of different routing paths per application, based on different routing criteria in order to optimize the performance aspect(s) of interest to each application. In this paper, we demonstrate how the VITRO routing solution could be employed in various use cases including smart homes/buildings, smart cities, smart business environments and security-related applications. We evaluate the achieved performance using computer simulation results and provide guidelines for prospective users.

With the evolution of the Internet, a huge number of real-time applications, like Voice over IP, has started to use IP as primary transmission medium. These services require high availability, which is not amongst the main features of today’s heterogeneous Internet where failures occur frequently. Unfortunately, the primary fast resilience scheme implemented in IP routers, Loop-Free Alternates (LFA), usually does not provide full protection against failures. Consequently, there has been a growing interest in LFA-based network optimization methods, aimed at tuning some aspect of the underlying IP topology to maximize the ratio of failure cases covered by LFA. The main goal of this chapter is to give a comprehensive overview of LFA and survey the related LFA network optimization methods, pointing out that these optimization tools can turn LFA into an easy-to-deploy yet highly effective IP fast resilience scheme.

The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is an architectural framework for delivering IP multimedia services. The appearance of Software Defined Networks (SDNs) concept in the IMS fabric can unleash the potential of the IMS technology which enables access agnostic services including applications like video-conferencing, multi-player gaming, white boarding all using an all-IP backbone. SDN requires some method for the control plane to communicate with the data plane. One such mechanism is OpenFlow which is a standard interface for controlling computer networking switches. This work presents our experience and implementation efforts in integrating OpenFlow mechanisms within IMS. Since this work also is done within the Future Internet Research and Experimentation domain, we also describe how we enabled our infrastructures with experimentation mechanisms.

Cloud computing market is in rapid expansion due to the opportunities to dynamically allocate a large amount of resources when needed and to pay only for their effective usage. However, many challenges, in terms of interoperability, performance guarantee, and dependability, should still be addressed to make cloud computing the right solution for companies. In this chapter we first discuss these challenges and then we present three components developed in the framework of the Contrail project: Contrail federation; SLA manager; and Virtual Execution Platform (VEP). These components provide solutions to guarantee interoperability in a cloud federation and to deploy distributed applications over a federation of heterogeneous cloud providers. The key to success of our solutions is the possibility to negotiate performance and security guarantees for an application and then map them on the physical resources.

The VISCERAL project is building a cloud-based evaluation framework for evaluating machine learning and information retrieval algorithms on large amounts of data. Instead of downloading data and running evaluations locally, the data will be centrally available on the cloud and algorithms to be evaluated will be programmed in computing instances on the cloud, effectively bringing the algorithms to the data. This approach allows evaluations to be performed on Terabytes of data without needing to consider the logistics of moving the data or storing the data on local infrastructure. After discussing the challenges of benchmarking on big data, the design of the VISCERAL system is presented, concentrating on the components for coordinating the participants in the benchmark and managing the ground truth creation. The first two benchmarks run on the VISCERAL framework will be on segmentation and retrieval of 3D medical images.

A service ecosystem is a virtual space ideally distributed across networks and geographical areas where vast numbers of services and other digital entities can coexist and converge to form

ad-hoc

solutions. In this paper we present experimental results showing the performance of two optimization models in service ecosystem. We describe the two models and how they operate under service ecosystem conditions. We emulate service ecosystem conditions in a multi-site federated Cloud and test the two models under different scenarios. The experimental results help us to determine strengths and weaknesses of the two optimization models enabling us to make recommendations for their use in different application domains.

IoT Cloud systems provide scalable capacity and dynamic behaviour control of virtual infrastructures for running applications, services and processes. Key aspects in this type of complex systems are the resource optimisation and the performance of dynamic management based on distributed user data metrics and/or IoT application data demands and/or resource utilisation metrics. In this paper we particularly focus on Cloud management perspective – integrating IoT Cloud service data management - based on annotated data of monitored Cloud performance and user profiles (matchmaking) and enabling management systems to use shared infrastructures and resources to enable efficient deployment of IoT services and applications. We illustrate a Cloud service management approach based on matchmaking operations and self-management principles which enable improved distribution and management of IoT services across different Cloud vendors and use the results from the analysis as mechanism to control applications and services deployment in Cloud systems. For our IoT Cloud data management solution we utilize performance metrics expressed with linked data in order to integrate monitored performance data and end user profile information (via linked data relations).

In this paper we discuss the Global Virtualization Architecture (GVA) that enables communications between network entities according to the way they refer to each other rather than understanding the constraints of particular networks. Our approach is to instantiate a virtual network that is based on identities of network entities and their demands on security and network capabilities. An entity may be physical e.g. a human user, a device, or any

thing

, or abstract, such as a computer program, service, group, or role. Each entity is identified by a set of attributes so that connections can be 1 to 1, 1 to many, or many to many. We call this a Virtual Group Network (VGN). VGNs are independent of location and device, and their properties may change with time as entities move.

Complying with security and privacy requirements of appliances such as mobile handsets, personal computers, servers for customers, enterprises and governments is mandatory to prevent from theft of sensitive data and to preserve their integrity. Nowadays, with the rising of the Cloud Computing approach in business fields, security and privacy are even more critical. The aim of this article is then to propose a way to build a secure and trustable Cloud. The idea is to spread and embed Secure Elements (SE) on each level of the Cloud in order to make a wide trusted infrastructure which complies with access control and isolation policies. This article presents therefore this new approach of trusted Cloud infrastructure based on a Network of Secure Elements (NoSE), and it illustrates this approach through different use cases.

IoT6 is a research project on the future Internet of Things. It aims at exploiting the potential of IPv6 and related standards to overcome current shortcomings and fragmentation of the Internet of Things. The main challenges and objectives of IoT6 are to research, design and develop a highly scalable IPv6-based Service-Oriented Architecture to achieve interoperability, mobility, cloud computing integration and intelligence distribution among heterogeneous smart things components, applications and services. The present article starts by a short introduction on IPv6 capabilities for the Internet of Things and information on the current deployment of IPv6 in the world. It continues with a presentation of the IoT6 architecture model and its concept of service discovery. Finally, it illustrates the potential of such IPv6-based architecture by presenting the integration of building automation components using legacy protocols.

The Smart City concept relates to improving efficiency of city services and facilitating a more sustainable development of cities. However, it is important to highlight that, in order to effectively progress towards such smart urban environments, the people living in these cities must be tightly engaged in this endeavour. This paper presents two novel services that have been implemented in order to bring the Smart City closer to the citizen. The Participatory Sensing service we are proposing exploits the advanced features of smartphones to make the user part of the ubiquitous sensing infrastructure over which the Smart City concept is built. The Augmented Reality service is connected to the smart city platform in order to create an advanced visualization tool where the plethora of available information is presented to citizens embedded in their natural surroundings. A brief description of the smart city platform on top of which these services are built is also presented.

This work presents a Cognitive Management framework for empowering the Internet of Things (IoT). This framework has the ability to dynamically adapt its behaviour, through self-management functionality, taking into account information and knowledge (obtained through machine learning) on the situation (e.g., internal status and status of environment), as well as policies (designating objectives, constraints, rules, etc.). Cognitive technologies constitute a unique and efficient approach for addressing the technological heterogeneity of the IoT and obtaining situation awareness, reliability and efficiency. The paper also presents a first indicative implementation of the proposed framework, comprising real sensors and actuators. The preliminary results of this work demonstrate high potential towards self-reconfigurable IoT.

The paper addresses an analysis of OSGi in the context of building modular middlewares for the Internet of Things. The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging approach to development of intelligent infrastructures combining various devices through the network. OSGi is a framework providing a number of specific mechanisms intended for building modular, fine-grained and loosely-coupled Java applications. Although a number of works have been devoted to OSGi, and several OSGi-based middlewares have been designed for the IoT, they do not thoroughly utilize mechanisms of OSGi. In this paper rich OSGi functions are analysed in terms of development middlewares for the IoT. An example implementation of the system illustrates the presented considerations.

A growing number of connected devices and solutions, related to the concept of Internet of Things, makes our environment increasingly smart and capable. However, existing application development processes and tools, designed for single device applications, do not allow to fully address this opportunity and to efficiently create applications that employ multiple devices and use the context information provided by ubiquitous sensors. To address this situation we propose a concept of Device Independent Architecture, which can be used to separate applications from devices and to provide a uniform platform for building smart multi-device applications. The main ideas of the Device Independent Architecture is to move processing from end-devices to a server side (backend) and to introduce a middleware layer that separates applications from devices and supports development of multi-device applications.

Future Internet Networked Enterprise Systems demand enhanced collaboration and mobility support. FI technologies are fundamental for increased service differentiation and cost optimisation in manufacturing environments. However, such ICT-based capabilities are not easy to introduce, in particular to SMEs, due to high costs and complexity. To progress in more effective development of value added services based on Web 2.0 principles within a mobile enterprise collaboration context, the complexity of collaboration in terms of information management needs to be leveraged from the end-users. Linked Data (LD) provides a universal and lightweight approach for the collaboration network. However, the elaboration of collaborative business processes based on LD still needs to be properly formulated for FI systems. The aim of this paper is to present a reference architecture for mobile enterprise collaboration based on LD interoperability. Moreover, security, semantic data lifting, business process modelling interoperability and mobile app orchestration enablers are presented to facilitate trustful and effective inter-organisational collaboration.

The information generated from the

Internet of Things

(IoT) potentially enables a better understanding of the physical world for humans and supports creation of ambient intelligence for a wide range of applications in different domains. A semantics-enabled service layer is a promising approach to facilitate seamless access and management of the information from the large, distributed and heterogeneous sources. This paper presents the efforts of the IoT.est project towards developing a framework for service creation and testing in an IoT environment. The architecture design extends the existing IoT reference architecture and enables a test-driven, semantics-based management of the entire service lifecycle. The validation of the architecture is shown though a dynamic test case generation and execution scenario.

In a world of continuous growth of economies and global population eco-sustainability is of outmost relevance. Especially, mobile broadband networks are facing an exponential growing traffic volume and so the sustainability of these networks comes into focus. The recently completed European funded Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) project EARTH has studied the impact of traffic growth on mobile broadband network energy consumption and carbon footprint, pioneering this field. This chapter summarizes the key insights of EARTH on questions like ”How does the exploding traffic impact the sustainability?”, ”How can energy efficiency be rated and predicted?”, ”What are the key solutions to improve the energy efficiency and how to efficiently integrate such solutions?” The results are representing the foundation of the maturing scientific engineering discipline of Energy Efficient Wireless Access, targeting the standardisation in IETF and 3GPP, strongly influencing academic research trends, and will soon be reflected in products and deployments of the European telecommunications industry.

Maintaining a viable balance between development costs and market coverage has turned out to be a challenging issue when developing mobile software applications. The diversity of devices running third-party developed software applications is rapidly expanding from PC, to mobile, home entertainment systems, and even the automotive industry. With the help of Web technology and the Internet infrastructure, ubiquitous applications have become a reality. Nevertheless, the variety of presentation and interaction modalities still limit the number of targetable devices. In this chapter we present webinos, a multi-device application platform founded on the Future Internet infrastructure. Hereto we describe webinos’ model-based user interface framework as a means to support context-aware adaptiveness for applications that are executed in such ubiquitous computing environments.

4G is a promising solution for the future mobile Internet through integrating heterogeneous radio access technologies (RATs) based on the Internet Protocol (IP) where multi-standard wireless devices allow mobile users to experience ubiquitous connectivity by roaming across different networks and connecting through the RAT that best suits their traffic requirements. However, holding multiple active interfaces incurs significant power consumption to the wireless devices. This necessitates investigating disruptive techniques for decreasing the power consumption of the 4G wireless devices. In this paper, we demonstrate how cognitive radio and cooperative communication can be integrated in 4G networks to conduct wireless devices to either perform vertical handover or execute relaying by exploiting their available short range interfaces (e.g., WiMedia, Bluetooth, etc) to reduce their power consumption while still enabling the required QoS. Simulation and experimental results validate that 4G wireless devices can double their battery lifetime by adopting the proposed strategies.

Sustaining European experimental facilities for Future Internet research is a significant challenge for testbed providers, funding bodies, and customers who depend on their long-term availability. To date, sustainability plans for experimental facilities have been dominated by abstract notions of business value and unclear business models. We argue that this fails to recognise that cost accountability is the critical element necessary to drive efficiency, irrespective of whether revenue is provided from public or commercial sources. Only through cost accountability can facilities make operational management decisions that are aligned with performance metrics and assess the financial viability of business plans. In this paper we demonstrate how cost modelling and usage accounting can be used to support operational and sustainability decisions for a federated cloud experimentation facility.

To determine actual attitudes and practices of those in the Future Internet industry towards user involvement, delegates at the 2012 FIA participated in a focus group and a survey. Continuous user involvement is highly valued and expected to maximise the societal benefits of FI applications. However, just over half of the FI projects apply a user-centred approach, and a large number of survey respondents admitted to being not very knowledgeable about standard user-centred design tools or techniques.

Reducing the network energy waste is one of the key challenges of the Future Internet. Many Internet-based applications require preserving network connectivity for getting incoming remote service requests or confirming their availability and presence to remote peers by sending periodic keep-alive or heart-beating messages. Billions of dollars of electricity is wasted every year to keep idle or unused network hosts fully powered-up only to maintain the network connectivity. This paper describes a new approach to design and implement the cooperative Network Connectivity Proxy (

NCP

) for reducing energy waste in the ever-growing future Internet. The

NCP

is implemented using Universal Plug and Play (

UPnP

), that uses a set of protocols to allow seamless discovery and interaction between the network hosts and the

NCP

. The

NCP

allows all registered network hosts to transition into the low power sleep modes and maintains the network connectivity on their behalf. It handles basic network presence and management protocols like

ICMP

,

DHCP

,

ARP

etc on behalf of the sleeping network hosts and wakes them up only when their resources are required. Depending on the network hosts time usage model, the

NCP

can provide about 60 to 70% network energy savings.

The 3DLife EU FP7 Network of Excellence focuses on stimulating joint research and integrating leading European research groups to create a long-term integration of critical mass for innovation of currently fragmented research addressing media Internet. It fosters the creation of sustainable and long-term relationships between existing national research groups and lay the foundations for a Virtual Centre of Excellence in 3D media Internet - EMC

2

. This is a summary of 3DLife’s missions as well as its achievements in the last three years.

CONCORD is the Facilitation and Support action for the EU-funded Future Internet Public-Private Partnerships (FI PPP) programme. CONCORD coordinates FI PPP cross-project activities. It facilitates knowledge transfer and co-creation across projects as well as with related external groups. It focuses on future-oriented strategic planning for FI PPP and on bringing a valuable contribution via unbiased outsider attention to FI PPP structures and processes.

The FLAMINGO project will strongly integrate the research of leading European research groups in the area of network and service management, strengthen the European and worldwide research in this area, and bridge the gap between scientific research and industrial application.

Large-scale computer networks supporting both communication and computation are extensively employed to deal with a variety of existing and emerging demanding applications. These high-performance applications, requiring very high network capacities and specific IT resources, cannot be delivered by the current Best Effort Internet. Optical networking is offering a very high capacity transport with increased dynamicity and flexibility through recent technology advancements including dynamic control planes etc. The European project GEYSERS (Generalised Architecture for Dynamic Infrastructure Services) proposed a novel architecture capable of provisioning “Optical Network and IT resources” for end-to-end service delivery. The proposed approach adopts the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) paradigm. The GEYSERS architecture presents an innovative solution to enable infrastructure operators to virtualize their optical network + IT physical resources and offer them as a service based on the user/application requirements. The adoption of Virtual Infrastructures (VIs) facilitates sharing of physical resources among various virtual operators, introducing new business models that suit well the nature and characteristics of the Future Internet and enables new exploitation opportunities for the underlying Physical Infrastructures (PIs).

iCore is an EU FP7 Integrated Project aimed at leveraging on the use of cognitive technologies for empowering the Internet of Things to deliver on the current expectations which see it as one of the main pillars of the Future Internet. The project brings together a strong set of industrial Partners, mostly from Europe but spanning also China and Japan which collaborate with research centers and universities to deliver solutions that address heterogeneity and reusability of IoT objects while striving for self-management capabilities that keep low complexity as the numbers of interconnected objects increase exponentially.

IoT6 aims at exploiting the potential of IPv6 and related standards to overcome current shortcomings and fragmentation of the Internet of Things. The main objectives of the project are to research, design and develop a highly scalable IPv6-based Service-Oriented Architecture to achieve interoperability, mobility, cloud computing integration and intelligence distribution among heterogeneous smart things components, applications and services.

The Future Communication Architecture for Mobile Cloud Services: Mobile Cloud Networking (MCN) is a EU FP7 Large-scale Integrating Project (IP) funded by the European Commission. MCN project was launched in November 2012 for the period of 36 month. In total top-tier 19 partners from industry and academia commit to jointly establish the vision of Mobile Cloud Networking, to

develop a fully cloud-based mobile communication and application platform

.

The Internet has seen a strong move to support overlay applications, which demand a coherent and integrated control in the underlying heterogeneous networks in a scalable, resilient, and energy-efficient manner. A tighter integration of network management and overlay service functionality can lead to cross-layer optimization of operations and management, thus, being a promising approach to offer a large business potential in operational perspectives for all players involved.

The SmartSantander project has deployed during the past two years a unique in the world city-scale experimental research facility in support of typical applications and services for a smart city. This facility is sufficiently large, open and flexible to enable horizontal and vertical federation with other experimental facilities, and to stimulate the development of new applications by end-users. Besides, it provides support to the experimental advanced research on IoT technologies, and allows a realistic assessment on new services by means of users’ acceptability tests. The facility already counts with more than 10,000 IoT devices (March 2013), and by the end of 2013 it will comprise of more than 12,000. The core of the facility is being installed in the city of Santander (Spain), the capital of the region of Cantabria situated on the north coast of Spain, and its surroundings. Besides Santander, other deployments have been placed in Lübeck (Germany), Guilford (UK) and Belgrade (Serbia). SmartSantander will enable the Future Internet of Things to become a reality.

Despite undeniable progress in the field of autonomic networking, the need for techniques enabling the transformation of operational models, and the evolution towards more flexible networks, real-world deployments of self-managing networks are still limited. Most efforts have been focused on solving manageability bottlenecks in a given technological domain, while communication services extend anywhere, regardless of the technological boundaries (e.g. wireline/wireless). The FP7 UniverSelf project is developing an end-to-end and modular framework based common management substrates and network empowerment mechanisms, following a reference trust assurance process to foster large-scale deployment and adoption by the ICT actors.