Section: Application Domains

Open Network Architecture

As discussed above, whereas the Internet can successfully interconnect billions of devices, it fails to provide a transparent and efficient sharing between information producers and consumers. Here Information producers and consumers must be considered in their broad definition, for instance a microphone, a speaker, a digital camera, a TV screen, a CPU, a hard drive, but also services such as email, storage in the cloud, a Facebook account, etc. In addition to classical contents, information can include a flow of content updated in real time, a description of a device, a Web service, etc. Enabling a transparent open access and sharing to information among all these devices will likely revolutionize the way the Internet is used today.

This research direction aims at proposing global solutions for easy and open content access and more generally to information interoperability. This activity will leverage on current efforts on information-centric networking (e.g., CCN, PSIRP, NetInf). In a first stage, the goal will consist in offering to users a personal overlay solution to publish and manage their own contents, at anytime and whatever the available network access technology (cable, Wi-Fi, 3G, 4G, etc.). The main challenge will be to design scalable mechanisms to seamlessly publish and access information in an efficient way, while preserving privacy. Another challenge will be to incrementally deploy these mechanisms and ensure their adoption by end users, content providers, and network operators. In the context of the evolution of the Internet architecture and in particular through Software defined Networking (SDN), there is a risk that some network operators or other tenants use the increased flexibility of the network against the benefits of the users. So, one of our concern will be to design innovative solutions to prevent possible violation of the network neutrality or to prevent illegitimate collection of private data. In parallel, we envision using SDN as an enabling technology to adapt the network in order to maximize user QoE. Indeed, virtualized network appliances are an efficient way to dynamically insert at strategic places in-network functionalities such as caching proxies, load balancers, cyphers, or firewalls. On this purpose, we plan to build a dedicated open infrastructure relying on a mix of middle boxes and mobile devices applications to capture, analyze and optimize traffic between mobile devices and the Internet.

SDN will introduce a deep shift in the way to design and deploy communications mechanisms. Traditionally, and mainly due to the ossification of the Internet, we used to enhance communication mechanisms by designing our solutions as overlays to the network infrastructure. Using SDN, we will have the opportunity to implement and use new functionalities within the network. If we make them available through well-defined API, those new network functions could be used to implement interoperable, transparent and open services for the benefit of the user. Indeed, implementing these functionalities within the network is not only more efficient than overlay solutions but this can facilitate the deployment of standard services. Important challenges will have to be solved to make this happen, and particularly, to ensure consistency, stability, scalability, reliability and privacy.

Our long-term objective in this research direction is to contribute to the design of network architecture providing native support for easy, transparent, secure, privacy preserving access to information. For instance, an objective is to enable end-users to leverage on their home infrastructure (set-top-boxes, computers, smartphones, tablets) to sanitize traffic and host information.