Section: Overall Objectives

Context

The increasing number of components (users, applications, services, devices) involved in today's Internet as well as their diversity make the Internet a very dynamic environment. Networks and cloud data centers have been becoming vital elements and an integral part of emerging 5G infrastructure. Indeed, networks continue to play their role interconnecting devices and systems, and clouds are now the de facto technology for hosting services, and for deploying storage and compute resources, and even Network Functions (NFs).

While telecom operators have been historically providing Internet connectivity and managing the Internet infrastructure and services, they are now loosing control to other stakeholders, particularly to Over-the-Top (OTT) content and service providers. Therefore, the delivery of Internet services has increased in complexity to mainly cope with the diversity and exponential growth of network traffic both at the core and at the edge. Intermediate players are multiplying and each of them has been proposing solutions to enhance service access performance.

In the Internet landscape, no single entity can claim a complete view of Internet topology and resources. Similarly, a single authority cannot control all interconnection networks and cloud data centers to effectively manage them and provide reliable and secure services to end users and devices at scale. The lack of clear visibility into Internet operations is exacerbated by the increasing use of encryption solutions ( http://www.arcep.fr/uploads/tx_gsavis/15-0832.pdf, accessed on 09/06/2017) which contributes to traffic opacity.