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

Partners :

Alcatel Lucent, Germany
DOCOMO Eurolabs, Germany
Ericsson AB, Sweden
Fraunhofer SIT, Germany
FT-Orange, France
Helsinki Univ. of Technology, Finland
HP, UK
INRIA, France
Institut Telecom, France
IST-TUL, Portugal
NEC Laboratories Europe, Germany
NICTA, Australia
Nokia Siemens Networks, Finland
Portugal Telecom Inovação, Portugal
Robotiker, Spain
Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden
SICS, Sweden
Technion, Israel
Telefónica, Spain
Telecom Italia, Italy
Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Universidad de Cantabria, Spain
University of Bremen, Germany
University of Paderborn, Germany

July 2010 to December 2012

The Internet’s architectural model has sustained continuous development for the past four decades and provided an excellent substrate for a wide range of applications. Despite its uncontested successes, some challenges for this model are becoming apparent: adding applications more complex than simple client/server or peer-to-peer applications, e.g., multi-tier, information-centric applications distributed over different providers, is becoming increasingly difficult; the range of so-far successful business models seems limited; and coordinating and integrating more diverse technologies, networks, and edge devices is getting overly expensive and security issues are becoming real barriers to deployment and use. These challenges are comprehensively and consistently addressed by the “Scalable & Adaptive Internet solutions” (SAIL) project.

SAIL will broaden the range of application models that can be supported in the Internet by making it easier to develop, deploy, and securely run complex networks, consisting of multiple virtualized networks owned by different entities, hosting complex applications, e.g., information-centric ones. This will increase business opportunities for a wide range of players, enliven competition, ensure the economic viability of the future Internet, evolve the Internet into the Network of the Future, and foster the creation of new products, services, and markets, ensuring continued growth.

NEC is leading the development of information-centric networking solutions (Network of Information), focusing on efficient distribution of named content instead of host-based end-to-end communication and is involved in the development of cloud networking solutions, combining concepts from virtual networking and cloud computing, providing a unified management framework for computing, storage and communication rather than controlling network and computation facilities as separate entities. Moreover, NEC is leading the cross-work-package theme on network management.

The interaction patterns of emerging applications no longer involve simply exchanging data end-to-end. These new patterns are centered on pieces of information, being accessed in a variety of ways. Instead of accessing and manipulating information only via an indirection of servers hosting them, putting information objects themselves at the centre of networking is appealing and has resulted in the notion of a Network of Information (NetInf). NetInf simplifies communication compared to end-to-end or store-and-forward networking, making it more suitable for large-scale, complex applications and for improved programmer and network efficiency. By caching multiple, equal copies of the same information object, NetInf natively supports large-scale content distribution. These properties also make NetInf suitable for delay tolerant networking (DTN). The NetInf architecture natively supports mobility of information objects, nodes, users, and applications.

But it is still unclear how to make sure such a Network of Information-based communication model can be supported efficiently in the network at runtime. For example, the model mandates that information be available near to its point of consumption, but that entails caching inside the network – it is not clear how to integrate such caches in routers, especially as the overall network scales up. However, such an integration will provide substantial benefits, e.g., by reducing information access delay and required bandwidth, improving dependability, and simplify network operation. These issues will be addressed by the research work in the project. A significant part of the work will be concerned with applying these concepts to specific application scenarios, e.g., next-generation mobile communication infrastructures.

Cloud computing builds upon advances on virtualization and distributed computing to support cost-efficient usage of computing and storage resources, emphasising on dynamic scaling and on demand services. Current cloud computing platforms and tools only focus on allocating and delivering storage and computing resources on demand to cloud users and on conducting live migration of virtual machines in the cloud. In addition, a number of network virtualization architectures and frameworks have been proposed in the literature to offer customized virtual networks with end-to-end control. Even though applications have evolved largely in the past years, current virtualization support for network management is still static in nature and mainly addresses the problem of subdividing a physical infrastructure into partitions that can be managed independently. No real attempt to merge networking and computing resources in a common framework has actually taken place. As of today there are no platforms, interfaces and infrastructures that fulfill all requirements for flexible and elastic cloud resources and services provisioning, access, networking, control and management.

Please find the project's publications at the official SAIL web site.

Official SAIL Web Site