ADvanced technologies for OPerated NETworks

Nadia Derouault (part-time), Inria Marie-Pierre Yvenat (part-time), Telecom Bretagne Armelle Lannuzel (part-time), Telecom Bretagne 2 Overall Objectives 2.1 Overview To access the Internet, end-users can use various types of network access technologies (e.g., optical, cellular, and WiFi). This variety of technologies is one of today's approaches to cope with two sustained trends: • The growing heterogeneity of terminals that are connected to the Internet, driven, in part, by the increasing adoption of Machine to Machine (M2M) communication. For example a home media center with a ber connection diers from a connected drone on multiple aspects, including mobility, energy constraints, and availability. • The growing heterogeneity of applications that rely on the Internet to communicate. For example, a Ultra High Denition (UHD) video service requires a bandwidth greater than 20 megabits per second (Mbps) while uploading measurements from a sensor can require only a few bytes per minute. Very dierent transmission technologies are required on the access to cope with this het-erogeneity. Even though the IP protocol has been widely adopted, leading to a widespread connectivity, by itself it is not enough to oer seamless communications. For instance, somebody using a smart phone connected to a WiFi network will have to restart most of his communications (e.g., downloading a le, a VoIP call) when switching to a 3G interface. Operators, motivated by reducing capital expenditures, are interested in using the same physical infrastructure to consolidate dierent access and aggregation networks, a process 4 Team ADOPNET IRISA Activity Report 2015 often referred to as network convergence. One of the key problems that has not yet been addressed by the research community is to unify the control planes of the dierent networks. Such a solution can oer several advantages, including energy eciency, reliability, availability, privacy, security, and ease of conguration. It is however still an open challenge. To deal with heterogeneous applications and terminals, network operators have also to design new content delivery systems. Although the research community has worked on increasing the transmission rate for years, the demand of content providers has changed. In particular, the next generation content delivery systems are expected to be more adaptive (to deal with heterogeneous terminals), and more reactive (to support interactive services). The new ar-chitectures and protocols will rely in particular on the availability of computing and storage resources at the edge of the network, and on the widespread adoption of software-based solutions , especially …