Internet Interconnection Techno-economics: A Proposal for Assured Quality Services and Business Models

The Internet is constructed by means of complex business interconnection agreements among multiple networks. However, the most commonly used agreements do not contain explicit Quality of Service reference. In this study a business rationale for Assured Service Quality (ASQ) inter-network services is presented and potential business models for their realization are proposed and analyzed. It is argued that ASQ products and business models could greatly enhance the health of the Internet interconnection ecosystem. A business model design framework that encompasses the key strategic decisions that would enable ASQ provisioning and generic collaboration is also provided. This framework is then elaborated using a number of off-net content delivery scenarios. Conclusions are hence drawn on the role of ASQ and ASQ-driven business models for the sustainable development of the "Future Internet"

On the impact of redirection on HTTP adaptive streaming services in federated CDNs

HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) refers to a set of novel streaming services that allow clients to adapt video quality based on current network conditions. Their use of existing HTTP delivery infrastructure makes them perfectly suited for deployment on existing Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). Nevertheless, this leads to some new challenges, related to the distribution of content across servers and the latency caused by request redirection. The federation or interconnection of CDNs proliferates these problems, as it allows content to be distributed across networks and increases the number of redirects. This paper focuses on the second problem, assessing the impact of redirection on the Quality of Experience of HAS in CDN interconnection scenarios. Additionally, several novel inter-CDN request routing policies are proposed that aim to reduce the number of redirects. Our results indicate that redirection latency significantly impacts performance of HAS and more intelligent routing mechanisms are capable of solving this problem

SDN Controller Mechanisms for Flexible and Customized Networking

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is seen as the most promising networking technology today. The spread of a new technology depends on the acceptance of the engineers implementing the networks. Typically, when engineers start the conceptualization of new network devices that work with a new paradigm, and that should provide expected business values, they must identify and utilize technical enablers for the defined business use cases. This paper tries to summarize essential SDN applications and defines the technical enablers for advanced and efficient SDN networking. To this end, we identify the core technical mechanisms, expecting to provide a useful analysis for the design of new SDN networks

The growing complexity of content delivery networks: Challenges and implications for the Internet ecosystem

Since the commercialization of the Internet, content and related applications, including video streaming, news, advertisements, and social interaction have moved online. It is broadly recognized that the rise of all of these different types of content (static and dynamic, and increasingly multimedia) has been one of the main forces behind the phenomenal growth of the Internet, and its emergence as essential infrastructure for how individuals across the globe gain access to the content sources they want. To accelerate the delivery of diverse content in the Internet and to provide commercial-grade performance for video delivery and the Web, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) were introduced. This paper describes the current CDN ecosystem and the forces that have driven its evolution. We outline the different CDN architectures and consider their relative strengths and weaknesses. Our analysis highlights the role of location, the growing complexity of the CDN ecosystem, and their relationship to and implications for interconnection markets.EC/H2020/679158/EU/Resolving the Tussle in the Internet: Mapping, Architecture, and Policy Making/ResolutioNe

Cache as a service:leveraging SDN to efficiently and transparently support Video-on-Demand on the last mile

High quality online video streaming, both live and on-demand, has become an essential part of consumers’ every-day lives. The popularity of video streaming as placed a heavy burden on the network infrastructure that now has to transfer an enormous amount of data very quickly to the end-user. To further exacerbate the situation, the Video-on-Demand (VoD) distribution paradigm uses a unicast independent flow for each user request. This results in multiple duplicate flows carrying the same video assets many times end-to-end. We present OpenCache: a highly configurable, efficient and transparent in-network caching service that aims to improve the VoD distribution efficiency by caching video assets as close to the end-user as possible. OpenCache leverages Software Defined Networking to benefit last mile environments by improving network utilisation and increasing the Quality of Experience for the end-user. Our evaluation on a pan-European OpenFlow testbed uses adaptive video streaming and demonstrates that with the use of OpenCache, the external link utilisation is reduced by 100%. Furthermore the streaming application receives better quality video and observes higher throughput, lower latency and shorter start up and buffering times

End-to-end resource management for federated delivery of multimedia services

Recently, the Internet has become a popular platform for the delivery of multimedia content. Currently, multimedia services are either offered by Over-the-top (OTT) providers or by access ISPs over a managed IP network. As OTT providers offer their content across the best-effort Internet, they cannot offer any Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees to their users. On the other hand, users of managed multimedia services are limited to the relatively small selection of content offered by their own ISP. This article presents a framework that combines the advantages of both existing approaches, by dynamically setting up federations between the stakeholders involved in the content delivery process. Specifically, the framework provides an automated mechanism to set up end-to-end federations for QoS-aware delivery of multimedia content across the Internet. QoS contracts are automatically negotiated between the content provider, its customers, and the intermediary network domains. Additionally, a federated resource reservation algorithm is presented, which allows the framework to identify the optimal set of stakeholders and resources to include within a federation. Its goal is to minimize delivery costs for the content provider, while satisfying customer QoS requirements. Moreover, the presented framework allows intermediary storage sites to be included in these federations, supporting on-the-fly deployment of content caches along the delivery paths. The algorithm was thoroughly evaluated in order to validate our approach and assess the merits of including intermediary storage sites. The results clearly show the benefits of our method, with delivery cost reductions of up to 80 % in the evaluated scenario

Video delivery networks : challenges, solutions and future directions

Internet video ecosystems are faced with the increasing requirements in versatile applications, ubiquitous consumption and freedom of creation and sharing, in which the user experience for high-quality services has become more and more important. Internet is also under tremendous pressure due to the exponential growth in video consumption. Video providers have been using content delivery networks (CDNs) to deliver high-quality video services. However, the new features in video generation and consumption require CDN to address the scalability, quality of service and flexibility challenges. As a result, we need to rethink future CDN for sustainable video delivery. To this end, we give an overview for the Internet video ecosystem evolution. We survey the existing video delivery solutions from the perspective of economic relationships, algorithms, mechanisms and architectures. At the end of the article, we propose a data-driven information plane for video delivery network as the future direction and discuss two case studies to demonstrate its necessity

Video Delivery Networks: Challenges, Solutions and Future Directions

Internet video ecosystems are faced with the increasing requirements in versatile applications, ubiquitous consumption and freedom of creation and sharing, in which the user experience for high-quality services has become more and more important. Internet is also under tremendous pressure due to the exponential growth in video consumption. Video providers have been using content delivery networks (CDNs) to deliver high-quality video services. However, the new features in video generation and consumption require CDN to address the scalability, quality of service and flexibility challenges. As a result, we need to rethink future CDN for sustainable video delivery. To this end, we give an overview for the Internet video ecosystem evolution. We survey the existing video delivery solutions from the perspective of economic relationships, algorithms, mechanisms and architectures. At the end of the article, we propose a data-driven information plane for video delivery network as the future direction and discuss two case studies to demonstrate its necessity

Development of a system compliant with the Application-Layer Traffic Optimization Protocol

Dissertação de mestrado integrado em Engenharia InformáticaWith the ever-increasing Internet usage that is following the start of the new decade, the need to optimize this world-scale network of computers becomes a big priority in the technological sphere that has the number of users rising, as are the Quality of Service (QoS) demands by applications in domains such as media streaming or virtual reality. In the face of rising traffic and stricter application demands, a better understand ing of how Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should manage their assets is needed. An important concern regards to how applications utilize the underlying network infras tructure over which they reside. Most of these applications act with little regard for ISP preferences, as exemplified by their lack of care in achieving traffic locality during their operation, which would be a preferable feature for network administrators, and that could also improve application performance. However, even a best-effort attempt by applications to cooperate will hardly succeed if ISP policies aren’t clearly commu nicated to them. Therefore, a system to bridge layer interests has much potential in helping achieve a mutually beneficial scenario. The main focus of this thesis is the Application-Layer Traffic Optimization (ALTO) work ing group, which was formed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to explore standardizations for network information retrieval. This group specified a request response protocol where authoritative entities provide resources containing network status information and administrative preferences. Sharing of infrastructural insight is done with the intent of enabling a cooperative environment, between the network overlay and underlay, during application operations, to obtain better infrastructural re sourcefulness and the consequential minimization of the associated operational costs. This work gives an overview of the historical network tussle between applications and service providers, presents the ALTO working group’s project as a solution, im plements an extended system built upon their ideas, and finally verifies the developed system’s efficiency, in a simulation, when compared to classical alternatives.Com o acrescido uso da Internet que acompanha o início da nova década, a necessidade de otimizar esta rede global de computadores passa a ser uma grande prioridade na esfera tecnológica que vê o seu número de utilizadores a aumentar, assim como a exigência, por parte das aplicações, de novos padrões de Qualidade de Serviço (QoS), como visto em domínios de transmissão de conteúdo multimédia em tempo real e em experiências de realidade virtual. Face ao aumento de tráfego e aos padrões de exigência aplicacional mais restritos, é necessário melhor compreender como os fornecedores de serviços Internet (ISPs) devem gerir os seus recursos. Um ponto fulcral é como aplicações utilizam os seus recursos da rede, onde muitas destas não têm consideração pelas preferências dos ISPs, como exemplificado pela sua falta de esforço em localizar tráfego, onde o contrário seria preferível por administradores de rede e teria potencial para melhorar o desempenho aplicacional. Uma tentativa de melhor esforço, por parte das aplicações, em resolver este problema, não será bem-sucedida se as preferências administrativas não forem claramente comunicadas. Portanto, um sistema que sirva de ponte de comunicação entre camadas pode potenciar um cenário mutuamente benéfico. O foco principal desta tese é o grupo de trabalho Application-Layer Traffic Optimization (ALTO), que foi formado pelo Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) para explorar estandardizações para recolha de informação da rede. Este grupo especificou um protocolo onde entidades autoritárias disponibilizam recursos com informação de estado de rede, e preferências administrativas. A partilha de conhecimento infraestrutural é feita para possibilitar um ambiente cooperativo entre redes overlay e underlay, para uma mais eficiente utilização de recursos e a consequente minimização de custos operacionais. É pretendido dar uma visão da histórica disputa entre aplicações e ISPs, assim como apresentar o projeto do grupo de trabalho ALTO como solução, implementar e melhorar sobre as suas ideias, e finalmente verificar a eficiência do sistema numa simulação, quando comparado com alternativas clássicas

Intercloud Architecture Framework for Heterogeneous Cloud Based Infrastructure Services Provisioning On-Demand

Abstract—This paper presents on-going research to develop the Intercloud Architecture Framework (ICAF) that addresses problems in multi-provider multi-domain heterogeneous cloud based infrastructure services and applications integration and interoperability, to allow their on-demand provisioning. The paper refers to existing standards and ongoing standardisation activity in Cloud Computing, in particular, recently published NIST Cloud Computing Reference Architecture (CCRA) and ITU-T JCA-Cloud activity. The proposed ICAF defines four complementary components addressing Intercloud integration and interoperability: multi-layer Cloud Services Model that combines commonly adopted cloud service models, such as IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, in one multilayer model with corresponding inter-layer interfaces; Intercloud Control and Management Plane that supports cloud based applications interaction