## 1 Introduction  
Over the past two decades, the Internet has steadily evolved from a closed, research-focused network that was primarily used for mail and data transfer to an Internet of things, where services and content have become the main focus. In the process, the Internet has thus become the world's largest service infrastructure. The simplicity of the Internet Protocol (IP) network layer and, most importantly, the minimal assumptions it makes on its support transport networks (_i.e._, a stateless datagram service with best-effort delivery) has contributed to this success. However, rapid changes have been observed over the recent years: increased network speed, high performance mobile computing devices and reduced Internet access price have changed the expectations of end users. They are no longer satisfied with an interconnected hosts view of the Internet and are more concerned with services and, increasingly, content. New qualifiers such as \"user-centric\", \"service-centric\" and \"content-centric\" have emerged and reflect the new focus of user communities. As a consequence, a whole new research area, tagged \"Future Internet\" has steadily emerged. A new design for the Internet architecture has been the focus of many research projects since mid-90s [1]. The IETF also contributed support to this evolution, notably through its work on IPv6. Yet all these efforts did not translate into concrete changes. Changes to the infrastructure of the Internet require the cooperation of the many Internet Service Providers (ISP) who own and operate the networks. This proves difficult as a single ISP usually does not gain any benefit from deploying a new protocol or infrastructure until it has been deployed by all the ISPs that are located in the end-to-end path [2]. Furthermore, ISPs do not see direct benefits (_i.e._, financial gain) in such deployments unless a partnership with the Service Provider (SP) can be achieved. Such partnerships have been possible, and even successful in a few cases through the creation of network overlays, built over the Internet for specialized services. These virtual networks [3, 4] support the deployment and coexistence of innovative new approaches for service access and delivery over the existing Internet infrastructure, and are part of the foundation of a content-centric Internet. Yet a number of problems persist: such overlays exist in multiple, specialized instances and they do not extend all the way to the user, thus ignoring specific constraints of the last mile. In this article, we go beyond simple network overlays to study the use of virtualization on the customer side, and providing an edge-side integration which benefits users, ISPs and SP alike, in the form of an _Edge Cloud_, essentially a computing and storage Cloud [5] running a variety of value-added services managed by an ISP in proximity of and for its customers. On the user side, one key value-added service of interest to ISPs is the _surrogate_, which is an application running on top of the core services of the Cloud designed to, among other features, support interactions with users to create tailored content in ways which can be tuned dynamically to access and terminal constraints. Note that the term surrogate is also used in RFC 3040 [6] to address a different types of network node. On the network side, the Edge Cloud, being located close to the user, acts as a support for the user to access, organize, provision and monitor Internet content in more flexible and efficient ways. As a typical Cloud, it also enables content and service providers to deploy their wares closer to the users, using generic technology, e.g., as an alternative to the Content Delivery Network (CDN) [7]. The rest of the article is organized as follows. We give a brief background on Internet architecture, content-centric Internet, Cloud computing and overlays in Section 2. User access-related issues that influence our proposed model are discussed in Section 3. The proposed Edge Cloud-based Internet architecture is presented in detail in Section 4.