Type of Project:

Collaborative Research Project within the 7th Framework Programme (FP7) of the European Commission

Partners :

STMicroelectronics, Italy
Synelixis Solutions Ltd, Greece
NEC Europe Ltd, UK
Telefonica I+D, Spain
Yahoo! Iberia, Spain
Technische Universität Berlin, Germany
Fraunhofer HHI, Germany
Fundacion Barcelona Media, Spain
Politecnico di Torino, Italy
University of California, Los Angeles, U.S.A.
Seoul National University, South Korea

February 2010 to July 2012

COAST aims to build a Future Content-Centric Network (FCN) overlay architecture, where the users will just specify which content or service they need, and the COAST framework will find the desired or the most relevant data and forward it to the users in an efficient, timely and network-friendly way.

To realize the above vision, COAST will focus on three key innovation pillars:

• “On the fly” identification and distributed “on-line” discovery. COAST will create a content-aware network of intelligent nodes (edge routers, home gateways, terminal devices), which will a) “on the fly” identify/classify content and identify Web services via inspection of the traffic that flows through them and b) discover “on line”, where services are located and content is located/cached, in order to optimal match users’ requests with availability, while meeting specific Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in content consumption.
• Content-Aware Delivery Network Architecture. COAST will efficiently and dynamically discover the underlying network infrastructure as well as user terminal devices and user needs considering the (possibly variable) capacity and quality (especially variable with mobility), the actual foreground (multimedia distribution) and background (other traffic) load, and construct content-aware overlays to offer distributed, robust and network-/service-provider friendly content delivery with optimal utilization of the networking topology and resources.
• Future media content adaptation and enrichment. COAST will provide for scalable, high-definition 3D/free-viewpoint video with interactive virtual panning/zooming, which will be on-the-fly adapted, enriched and optimized to the user preferences, network and terminal characteristics and conditions and optimal streamed over dynamic constructed overlays.

NEC is leading the task related to the Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) design and implementation. DPI node are, in the COAST architecture, meant to discover most popular contents and interface to the search engine meant to make use of this information for increasing the relevance of the search results.

NEC is also working on developing a network-aware Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) based on the ALTO concept. The goal is to make CDNs network-aware allowing them to take informed decisions for improving user performance while reducing resource consumption in the underlying network infrastructure.

Last but not least NEC is driving COAST standardization efforts in the IETF, in particular in ALTO, PPSP and DECADE Working Groups.

Please find the project’s publications at the official COAST web site.

Official COAST Web Site