Design and Performance Evaluation of New Mechanisms for the Future Internet - New Paradigms and Economic Aspects

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Tobias Hoßfeld; Professor Dr.-Ing. Phuoc Tran-Gia (†)
• Subject Area: Security and Dependability, Operating-, Communication- and Distributed Systems
• Term: from 2012 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 209943214

The importance of the Internet for social and economic ends has increased over the last years, especially due to the large market growth for smartphones and tablet computers. However, the mechanisms used for traffic management in the Internet are still based on concepts unchanged since its initial inception and cannot cope with the increasing requirements of users, network operators and service providers, such as the Quality of Experience (QoE) perceived by the user and economic considerations of the service providers. In order to deal with the new requirements, the project ÖkoNet considers the economic interests of all involved stakeholders during the design of new traffic management mechanisms.One example for this is the efficient transmission of video content studied during the first phase of ÖkoNet. Here, the QoE, energy consumption of user equipment and costs for the network operators were considered. A QoE Monitoring mechanism was developed for this scenario which was implemented at a mobile network operator. Furthermore, the developed QoE models were recommended for ITU standardisation.In the second phase of this project, the applicability of the traffic management mechanism design principles 'Economic Traffic Management' and 'Design for Tussle' is studied on the example of two orthogonal use cases. Results obtained from the use cases are integrated in a guideline for developers of current or future mechanisms and can be adapted for the specific mechanism under development. Furthermore, the guideline discusses specific approaches for the evaluation of technical mechanisms while considering economic influences as well as the underlying paradigms.The first use case considers the efficient distribution of video content using HTTP adaptive streaming in content centric networks (CCN). The performance of video dissemination regarding QoE, cost of inter-domain traffic and efficient use of available video sources are especially considered. The second use case studies Mobile Cloud Computing and evaluates costs for consumption of cloud resources, power consumption of the user equipment, QoE and the signalling load on the mobile network.For both scenarios, traffic management mechanisms are developed iteratively using methods from analytic and simulative performance evaluation. In order to validate the knowledge obtained from the models, a prototype is built, which is used to evaluate the developed strategies under real-world constraints.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Cooperation Partner: Professorin Dr. Alexandra Schwartz