Multimedia delivery in the future internet

The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks, like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet. Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new) multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety. In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/ media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to contribute towards such a vision. Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6) and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms

Business Case and Technology Analysis for 5G Low Latency Applications

A large number of new consumer and industrial applications are likely to change the classic operator's business models and provide a wide range of new markets to enter. This article analyses the most relevant 5G use cases that require ultra-low latency, from both technical and business perspectives. Low latency services pose challenging requirements to the network, and to fulfill them operators need to invest in costly changes in their network. In this sense, it is not clear whether such investments are going to be amortized with these new business models. In light of this, specific applications and requirements are described and the potential market benefits for operators are analysed. Conclusions show that operators have clear opportunities to add value and position themselves strongly with the increasing number of services to be provided by 5G.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figure

Development of a secure monitoring framework for optical disaggregated data centres

Data center (DC) infrastructures are a key piece of nowadays telecom and cloud services delivery, enabling the access and storage of enormous quantities of information as well as the execution of complex applications and services. Such aspect is being accentuated with the advent of 5G and beyond architectures, since a significant portion of the network and service functions are being deployed as specialized virtual elements inside dedicated DC infrastructures. As such, the development of new architectures to better exploit the resources of DC becomes of paramount importanceThe mismatch between the variability of resources required by running applications and the fixed amount of resources in server units severely limits resource utilization in today's Data Centers (DCs). The Disaggregated DC (DDC) paradigm was recently introduced to address these limitations. The main idea behind DDCs is to divide the various computational resources into independent hardware modules/blades, which are mounted in racks, bringing greater modularity and allowing operators to optimize their deployments for improved efficiency and performance, thus, offering high resource allocation flexibility. Moreover, to efficiently exploit the hardware blades and establish the connections across them according to upper layer requirements, a flexible control and management framework is required. In this regard, following current industrial trends, the Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm is one of the leading technologies for the control of DC infrastructures, allowing for the establishment of high-speed, low-latency optical connections between hardware components in DDCs in response to the demands of higher-level services and applications. With these concepts in mind, the primary objective of this thesis is to design and carry out the implementation of the control of a DDC infrastructure layer that is founded on the SDN principles and makes use of optical technologies for the intra-DC network fabric, highlighting the importance of quality control and monitoring. Thanks to several SDN agents, it becomes possible to gather statistics and metrics from the multiple infrastructure elements (computational blades and network equipment), allowing DC operators to monitor and make informed decisions on how to utilize the infrastructure resources to the greatest extent feasible. Indeed, quality assurance operations are of capital importance in modern DC infrastructures, thus, it becomes essential to guarantee a secure communication channel for gathering infrastructure metrics/statistics and enforcing (re-)configurations, closing the full loop, then addressing the security layer to secure the communication channel by encryption and providing authentication for the server and the client

Strengthening Trust in the Future ICT Infrastructure

Moving towards a hyperconnected society in the forthcoming “zettabyte” era requires a trusted ICT infrastructure for sharing information and creating knowledge. To advance the efforts to build converged ICT services and reliable information infrastructures, ITU-T has recently started a work item on future trusted ICT infrastructures. In this paper, we introduce the concept of a social-cyber-physical infrastructure from the social Internet of Things paradigm and present different meanings from various perspectives for a clear understanding of trust. Then, the paper identifies key challenges for a trustworthy ICT infrastructure. Finally, we propose a generic architectural framework for trust provisioning and presents strategies to stimulate activities for future standardization on trust with related standardization bodies

View on 5G Architecture: Version 1.0

The current white paper focuses on the produced results after one year research mainly from 16 projects working on the abovementioned domains. During several months, representatives from these projects have worked together to identify the key findings of their projects and capture the commonalities and also the different approaches and trends. Also they have worked to determine the challenges that remain to be overcome so as to meet the 5G requirements. The goal of 5G Architecture Working Group is to use the results captured in this white paper to assist the participating projects achieve a common reference framework. The work of this working group will continue during the following year so as to capture the latest results to be produced by the projects and further elaborate this reference framework. The 5G networks will be built around people and things and will natively meet the requirements of three groups of use cases: • Massive broadband (xMBB) that delivers gigabytes of bandwidth on demand • Massive machine-type communication (mMTC) that connects billions of sensors and machines • Critical machine-type communication (uMTC) that allows immediate feedback with high reliability and enables for example remote control over robots and autonomous driving. The demand for mobile broadband will continue to increase in the next years, largely driven by the need to deliver ultra-high definition video. However, 5G networks will also be the platform enabling growth in many industries, ranging from the IT industry to the automotive, manufacturing industries entertainment, etc. 5G will enable new applications like for example autonomous driving, remote control of robots and tactile applications, but these also bring a lot of challenges to the network. Some of these are related to provide low latency in the order of few milliseconds and high reliability compared to fixed lines. But the biggest challenge for 5G networks will be that the services to cater for a diverse set of services and their requirements. To achieve this, the goal for 5G networks will be to improve the flexibility in the architecture. The white paper is organized as follows. In section 2 we discuss the key business and technical requirements that drive the evolution of 4G networks into the 5G. In section 3 we provide the key points of the overall 5G architecture where as in section 4 we elaborate on the functional architecture. Different issues related to the physical deployment in the access, metro and core networks of the 5G network are discussed in section 5 while in section 6 we present software network enablers that are expected to play a significant role in the future networks. Section 7 presents potential impacts on standardization and section 8 concludes the white paper

A hierarchical AI-based control plane solution for multitechnology deterministic networks

Following the Industry 4.0 vision of a full digitiSation of the industry, time-critical services and applications, allowing network infrastructures to deliver information with determinism and reliability, are becoming more and more relevant for a set of vertical sectors. As a consequence, deterministic network solutions are progressively emerging, albeit they are still bounded to specific technological domains. Even considering the existence of interconnected deterministic networks, the provision of an end-to-end (E2E) deterministic service over them must rely on a specific control plane architecture, capable of seamlessly integrate and control the underlying multi-technology data plane. In this work, we envision such a control plane solution, extending previous works and exploiting several innovations and novel architectural concepts. The proposed control architecture is service-centric, in order to provide the necessary flexibility, scalability, and modularity to deal with a heterogenous data plane. The architecture is hierarchical and encompasses a set of management platforms to interact with specific network technologies overarched by an E2E platform for the management, monitoring, and control of E2E deterministic services. Furthermore, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Digital Twinning are used to enable network predictability and automation, as well as smart resource allocation, to ensure service reliability in dynamic scenarios where existing services may terminate and new ones may need to be deployed