EuroNF: Anticipating the Network of the Future - From Theory to Design

Future networks became a central topic with a major debate concerning whether moving towards the new networked society will be evolutionary or disruptive. In the future networked society, the physical and digital worlds will merge based on the massive usage of wireless sensor networks. Objects will be able to identify and locate themselves and to communicate through radio interfaces. Self-organized edge networks will become more and more common. Virtualization and programmability will allow for providing different networking environments over the same infrastructure. Autonomic networking will deal with the increasing complexity of I&C systems. End-user empowerment will increase with their capacity of providing services and content.

This new environment forces the scientific community to develop new principles and methods to design/dimension/control/manage future multi-technology architectures. The new paradigms raise new challenging scientific and technological problems embedded in complex policy, governance, and worldwide standards issues. Dealing with the diversity of these scientific and socio-economic challenges requires the integration of a wide range of research capacities; a role that Euro-NF will fulfil.

Indeed, Euro-NF extends, in scope and duration, the successful Euro-NGI/FGI NoE that has integrated the required critical mass on the networks of the future and is now a major worldwide player in this area. The consortium has evolved in order to have an optimal coverage of the new scope.

Euro-NF will therefore cover the integration of a wide range of European research capacities, including researchers and research and dissemination activities. As such Euro-NF will continue to develop as a prominent European center of excellence in Future networks design and engineering, acting as a “Collective Intelligence Think Tank”, representing a major support for the European Society leading towards a European leadership in this area.



Joint Research Projects

MOMO
As mobile devices are more and more equipped with different wireless radio interfaces, multi-homing becomes feasible for the sake of better quality of experience and robustness. From a networking perspective, multi-homing is challenging due to the heterogeneity of the accessed wireless networks. MOMO proposes the use of multi-overlays as a network virtualization technique to integrate and control different QoS, mobility management, pricing, privacy and security techniques of the involved wireless networks. Hereby, MOMO will provide a set of models and methods: (i) a context model relevant for wireless networking togehter with a mapping function to assign overlays to particular multivariate context data, (ii) analytical models for creating an appropriate number of multi-overlays considering the trade-off between perfect fit and overhead for overlay creation and management, (iv) an appropriate search algorithm for finding the best fitting overlay either based on centralized or based on decentralized approaches (or hybrid forms), and (iv) efficient adaptation and maintenance routines of multi-overlays. The models provided by MOMO will be targeted to the use case of wireless mesh networks.
AMESA

Search engine advertising is an increasingly important online advertising medium, which attracts a large number of both advertisers and Internet users and is one of the main sources of revenue for search engines. AMESA will study the design of mechanisms as well as bidding strategies for the advertisers in order to attain certain desirable properties. Our main goal is to understand better what constitutes an optimal mechanism (with respect to given criteria) either from the search engine's or from the advertisers' point of view and also to apply our study to more realistic settings than the ones that have been considered in the literature (e.g. studying the effect of budget constraints is one such direction).

ISPeer
The ISPeer project studies how the interaction between Internet service providers and peer-to-peer content distribution systems could lead to mutual benefits. The project will study the possible interaction patterns in general, and will show on the example of an ISP managed peer-to-peer video on demand system how the interaction can be implemented.

Publications

MOMO

Book Chapters

  • S. Sargento, R. Matos, K. Hummel, A. Hess, S. Toumpis, Y. Tselekounis, G.D. Stamoulis, Y. Al-Hazmi, M. Ali, H. De Meer, Multi-Access Communications in Wireless Mesh Networks by Virtualization, Wireless Multi-Access Environments and Quality of Service Provisioning: Solutions and Application, IGI Global, June 2011. [pdf]

Conferences

  • S. Toumpis, I. Tselekounis, G.D. Stamoulis, H. Meyery, A. Hessy, K.A. Hummel, Cognitive WMNs: A distributed mechanism for leasing cellular bandwidth, in Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE Workshop on Hot Topics in Mesh Networking (HotMesh), Lucca, 20 June 2011. [pdf]

AMESA

Journals

  • P. Maille, E. Markakis, M. Naldi, G.D. Stamoulis, B. Tuffin, Sponsored Search Auctions: An Overview of research with emphasis on Game Theoretic Aspects, Electronic Commerce Research Journal, 2011 (survey, resubmitted for further evaluation) [pdf]

ISPeer

Journals

  • G. Dan, T. Hossfeld, S. Oechsner, P. Cholda, R. Stankiewicz, I. Papafili, G.D. Stamoulis, Interaction patterns between P2P content distribution systems and ISPs, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, December 2010. [pdf]

JRA3.2

Presentations

  • I. Papafili, Insertion of IoPs: Cache capacity allocation & cost-benefit analysis, Euro-NF plenary meeting, Kaiserslautern, June 29-30, 2011. [pdf]
  • I. Papafili, A game-theoretic Framework for ISP Interactions in the Context of ETM, EuroNF Workshop on Traffic and Congestion Control, Volos, March 2011. [pdf]
  • G. D. Stamoulis, A game-theoretic framework for ISP interactions in the context of ETM, 3rd EuroNF Socio-Economics Workshop, Ghent, Belgium, December 15, 2010.
  • S. Soursos: Dealing with the Economic Implications of Overlay Traffic: Issues and Ideas, Euro-NF plenary meeting, Kaiserslautern, June 3-5, 2009.
  • I. Papafili, Insertion of ISP-owned Peer in BitTorrent Networks, EuroNF Workshop on Socio-Economic issues, Athens, October 2008.