Pruno

Prospects for Realizing User-centric Network Orchestration To overcome the current limitations of the Internet, several different approaches are existing which can be mainly distinguished into network-aware applications and application-aware networks. Bringing together both approaches, network-application interfaces are to be deployed to realize smart mediation of application data through the Internet. In this context, content mediation includes resource management as well as traffic management. For smart applications and services in the Internet, however, the application and the mediation network should directly communicate with each other and exchange information adequately, such that the end user experiences a good quality. To this end, Quality of Experience (QoE) of different applications is considered within the project. In particular, we consider A) streaming services like YouTube video streaming with high video quality playback demands and B) interactive services like social networks with high security and privacy demands. The main goal of the project is to investigate prospects for realizing user-centric network orchestration. The conceptual prospects may include network virtualization, service composition as well as the forwarding on gates approach. These architectural concepts dynamically react on user and application requirements. To achieve this goal, the following methodology is proposed. First, subjective user studies are required to develop appropriate QoE models taking into account the key QoE influence factors quantitatively. This allows deriving the user requirements based on the QoE model, which can be translated into certain application-specific requirements. Second, such detailed requirements need to be passed to the network stack, which is not possible with today’s APIs. Therefore, new application-mediation interfaces, providing the information needed by composition and forwarding services, have to be designed. As a result of this project, the different prospects for realizing this user-centric network orchestration are evaluated and compared qualitatively.