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An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including wireless infrastructure sharing, wireless mesh networks framework and delivery of multimedia service over multi-access networks.

IP multihoming is a networking concept with a deceptively simple definition in theory. In practice, however, multihoming has proved difficult to implement and optimize for. Moreover, it is a concept, which, once adopted in the core Internet architecture, has a significant impact on operation and maintenance. A trivial definition of multihoming would state that an end-node or an end-site has multiple first-hop connections to the network. In this paper, we survey and summarize in a comprehensive manner recent developments in IP multihoming. After introducing the fundamentals, we present the architectural goals and system design principles for multihoming, and review different approaches. We survey multihoming support at the application, session, transport, and network layers, covering all recent proposals based on a locator/identifier split approach. We critically evaluate multihoming support in these proposals and detail recent developments with respect to multihoming and mobility management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the proliferation of mobile fixed-power devices, energy consumption emerged as a vibrant research and development subject area in networking. Mobile devices are designed with several hard constraints such as low cost and small geometries, as well as, low heat dissipation, and operation using fixed power sources. Manufacturers have been adding an ever increasing set of features to small mobile devices, which are no longer binary-use gadgets, but fully-fledged computers. With respect to power management, several mechanisms have been introduced; but, by and large, gains in power consumption at the hardware level have been essentially traded for extended functionality. All in all, the overall operational time has not increased. For example, early GSM cellular phones could only allow for less than an hour of talk time in a single battery charge. By the late 1990s, top models, introduced through better engineering and an evolutionary development approach, featured talk times increased by a factor of 3-5. This level of performance has remained the same over the last decade, although it is well below user expectations. This article reviews the evolution from simple cell phones toward the feature-rich mobile networked devices we have come to expect from manufacturers, and explains the factors that have led to stagnation in operational time. We then turn our attention to the multiaccess nature of modern mobile devices and the respective implications for power management. We find that the current host-centric mobile networking paradigm, based on end-to-end always on connectivity, leads to energy-inefficient operation. Finally, this article introduces information-centric networking and outlines open research issues in the design of energy-efficient future Internet architectures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tubiquitous ultra-broadband network enabling the future Internet (FI), is not only about new releases of current network generations and services, but, more significantly, will be associated with a true revolution in the information and communications technologies (ICT) field: the network will efficiently and effectively take forward new-fangled services to everyone and everything, such as cognitive objects and cyber physical systems (CPSs). A "full immersive (3D) experience" enriched by "context information" and, in particular, "anything or everything as a service (XaaS)" are the main business drivers for massive adoption and market uptake of the new fundamental enabling technologies, beyond today's "client-server" model, where the network has been reduced to a ubiquitous "pipe of bits." XaaS refers to those services ? beyond the current models of software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and platfore as a service (PaaS), SPI models, of cloud computing ? such as data as a service (DaaS), security as a service (again, SaaS), network as a service (NaaS), knowledge as a service (KaaS), machine as a service (MaaS), and robot as a service (RaaS), which could be delivered over the advanced 5G infrastructure, without the need to own hardware, software, or even the cognitive objects themselves. Communication services, such as voice and video telephony, will be enriched and bundled with other services. The network infrastructure is expected to become the "nervous system" of the actual digital society and digital economy. This challenge calls for a complete redesign of services and service capabilities, architectures, interfaces, functions, access and non-access stratum protocols and related procedures, as well as advanced algorithms (e.g., for unified connection, security, mobility and routing management, and reconfiguration of ICT services; and any type of resource of cyber physical systems). The expected transformation will be especially true at the edge, that is, around the end user (or prosumer), where the "intelligence" already started migrating a few years ago, and where massive processing, memory, and storage capacity are gradually accumulating. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss various reports within the issue on topics including machine-to-machine (M2M) networks, deployment of services for Internet of Things (IoT) and proof-of-concept prototype to assess the feasibility of information sharing limit.

We argued boldly in the first part of the feature topic on information-centric networking (ICN) [1] that ICN marks a fundamental shift in communications and networking. Indeed, we claim that the paradigm change ICN fosters is poised to have a large impact on the way we think about telecommunications in general, the way we design network architectures in particular, the trade-offs we consider in the specification of (future) protocols, and the possibilities for new services, especially in mobile and wireless environments. For example, in the first part of this feature topic we saw how content-centric networking (CCN) can be used to build social networking applications [2, 3] at a fraction of the complexity of today's systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss various reports within the issue on topics including wireless and mobile networks, the use of traffic engineering techniques in the Internet, and identity and privacy management in mobile networks.

The second installment of the Feature Topic on network and service virtualization takes off from where Part I concluded: network function virtualization (NFV) deployment and operation. We are currently observing a transition from software-defined networking (SDN) focusing solely on programming packet-switching network elements based on lower-layer flow-oriented primitives toward the wider concept of infrastructure programmability. Such programmability extends vertically within the network stack to encompass optical layer capabilities as well as features located at upper layers of the traditional network stack. In addition, infrastructure programmability extends horizontally well beyond SDN to other resource stacks to encompass virtualized compute and storage resources. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The introduction of software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) has altered, in a wholesale manner, the way to plan for network infrastructure evolution in the forthcoming decade. This Feature Topic aims to provide a concise reference entry point to a wider audience with respect to carrier-grade networking and service virtualization with emphasis on automating the entire networking and cloud infrastructure. The first steps in network virtualization are already taking place today, although more often than not through a piecemeal approach that simply replaces hardware-based network appliances with software-based alternatives. This may help to reduce operator costs in the mid-term but does not alter the full life cycle of service creation and deployment. The real potential for network and service virtualization lies in upgrading the entire toolbox network operators have at their disposal, as state-of-the-art research and development efforts already indicate. For example, the European FP7 UNIFY project defines an architecture where the entire network, from home devices to data centers, forms a unified production environment, a dynamic service creation platform able to distribute functions and state anywhere in the network, aided by automated orchestration engines; see www.fp7-unify.eu for more details. While drafting the Call for Papers for this Feature Topic, our first goal was to attract high-quality contributions from operator and industry research labs as this topic is particularly pertinent to practitioners in the field. Carriers, in particular, can be the main beneficiaries from the emerging infrastructures based on NFV, SDN, and cloud technologies. Therefore, articles by authors working at global operators currently developing, evaluating, and standardizing solutions for network and service virtualization were particularly welcome and encouraged. In this sense, we are glad that all five selected papers for publication in this issue are penned by experts affiliated with European, American, and Asian carriers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Information-centric networking (ICN) has received significant attention in recent years, mainly driven by the fact that distributing and manipulating information has become the major function of the Internet today. Unlike the traditional host-centric networking paradigm where information is obtained by contacting specified named hosts, ICN is aimed at providing native network primitives for efficient information retrieval by directly naming and operating on information objects. Foreseeing the need and benefits of developing the future Internet with ICN concepts as a key ingredient, many leading research groups, both industrial and academic, have created a sizable community devoting their efforts to information- centric future Internet designs and prototype implementations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile carrier networks follow an architecture where network elements and their interfaces are defined in detail through standardization, but provide limited ways to develop new network features once deployed. In recent years we have witnessed rapid growth in over-the-top mobile applications and a 10-fold increase in subscriber traffic while ground-breaking network innovation took a back seat. We argue that carrier networks can benefit from advances in computer science and pertinent technology trends by incorporating a new way of thinking in their current toolbox. This article introduces a blueprint for implementing current as well as future network architectures based on a software-defined networking approach. Our architecture enables operators to capitalize on a flow-based forwarding model and fosters a rich environment for innovation inside the mobile network. In this article, we validate this concept in our wireless network research laboratory, demonstrate the programmability and flexibility of the architecture, and provide implementation and experimentation details. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Information-centric networking (ICN) is a relatively new research area that is motivated by significant changes witnessed in the industry regarding applications and services, as well as customer practice and expectations. Indeed, the vast majority of network traffic today (both Internet and intranet) consists of content dissemination, information that is addressed to more than one recipient. This includes not only content created explicitly for public dissemination (e.g., by large organizations such as news agencies, movie studios, and meteorological offices), but also content dissemination between restricted groups of recipients and, increasingly, content generated by end users. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although there is consensus that software defined networking and network functions virtualization overhaul service provisioning and deployment, the community still lacks a definite answer on how carrier-grade operations praxis needs to evolve. This article presents what lies beyond the first evolutionary steps in network management, identifies the challenges in service verification, observability, and troubleshooting, and explains how to address them using our Service Provider DevOps (SP-DevOps) framework. We compendiously cover the entire process from design goals to tool realization and employ an elastic version of an industry-standard use case to show how on-the-fly verification, software-defined monitoring, and automated troubleshooting of services reduce the cost of fault management actions. We assess SP-DevOps with respect to key attributes of software-defined telecommunication infrastructures both qualitatively and quantitatively, and demonstrate that SP-DevOps paves the way toward carrier-grade operations and management in the network virtualization era. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Programmable networks are a substantial part of current R&D on future internet (FI) in Europe and worldwide, with considerable impact generated by large-scale test bed infrastructures. In such test beds, researchers validate proof-of-concept prototypes for new algorithms and mechanisms for efficiently controlling and managing network resources. One of the key domains for FI research is software-defined networking (SDN), which creates innovations in existing Internet architectures by shifting the control and logic outside the network equipment to Data Centres. International cooperation among leading research centres in Europe, Americas and Asia is key to validate SDN foundations and tools. EU and Japan have jointly funded the FELIX project (federated test-beds for large-scale infrastructure experiments), which defines a common control and orchestration framework to manage federated FI test beds across continents. This framework enables an experimenter to (i) request and obtain resources across different test bed infrastructures dynamically; (ii) manage and control the network paths connecting the federated SDN test beds; (iii) monitor the underlying resources and (iv) use distributed applications executed on the federated infrastructures. This paper describes the high-level architecture of the FELIX framework and details six use cases that will be employed for validation. We present our analysis and end-user considerations, highlighting the necessity for resource accessibility and coherent use of physical connections over a large-scale test bed where different control technologies such as OpenFlow and the network service interface (NSI) are simultaneously used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energy efficiency is increasingly important for future information and communication technologies (ICT), because the increased usage of ICT, together with increasing energy costs and the need to reduce green house gas emissions call for energy-efficient technologies that decrease the overall energy consumption of computation, storage and communications. Cloud computing has recently received considerable attention, as a promising approach for delivering ICT services by improving the utilization of data centre resources. In principle, cloud computing can be an inherently energy-efficient technology for ICT provided that its potential for significant energy savings that have so far focused on hardware aspects, can be fully explored with respect to system operation and networking aspects. Thus this paper, in the context of cloud computing, reviews the usage of methods and technologies currently used for energy-efficient operation of computer hardware and network infrastructure. After surveying some of the current best practice and relevant literature in this area, this paper identifies some of the remaining key research challenges that arise when such energy-saving techniques are extended for use in cloud computing environments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]