Towards a Socially-Aware Management of New Overlay Application Traffic Combined with Energy Efficiency in the Internet (SmartenIT)

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.