The Internet has crossed new frontiers with access to it getting faster and cheaper. Considering that the architectural foundations of today's Internet were laid more than three decades ago, the Internet has done remarkably well until today coping with the growing demand. However, the future Internet architecture is expected to support not only the ever growing number of users and devices, but also a diverse set of new applications and services. Departing from the traditional host-centric access paradigm, where access to a desired content is mapped to its location, an information-centric model enables the association of access to a desired content with the content itself, irrespective of the location where it is being held. UMOBILE tailors the information-centric communication model to meet the requirements of opportunistic communications, integrating those connectivity approaches into a single architecture. By pushing services near the edge of the network, such an architecture can pervasively operate in any networking environment and allows for the development of innovative applications, providing access to data independent of the level of end-to-end connectivity availability. As technology moves forward, new devices and applications are increasingly emerging as diverse components of a giant puzzle, all to be supported by the same network architecture known as the Internet. The latter, until now, has coped more than well with the challenges. Indeed, an architecture designed for communication between fixed hosts and remote access of resources has been accommodating a growing number of mobile devices, as well as applications that are increasingly directed at content dissemination. This model is becoming increasingly inefficient, though, as these communication needs become the norm rather than the exception. Mobile users and traffic are now the dominant part of the network, while emerging paradigms such as the Internet of Things are bringing billions of distributed sensors into the picture, questioning the scalability of current solutions. While intermittent connectivity is naturally calling for support in such environments, other visions such as the Tactile Internet require extremely low latency, high availability, and reliability -all of which are challenging the current Internet infrastructure. In response to these ongoing developments, a lot of research has been invested in future Internet technologies. A first class of solutions are compatible with the current Internet architecture and devise suitable mechanisms to place the focus on the network edge (e.g., device-todevice opportunistic communications and edge caching in fifth generation, 5G, mobile networks), realizing the fog and edge computing paradigm. The second class advocates alternative Internet architectures that solve the problems in a native way, such as the information-centric networking (ICN) and delay-tolerant networking (DTN) paradigms. We build on all the latest advancements and develop an architecture that shifts the current focus of the architectural design. Network periphery is our center of attention, as the vast majority of traffic comes from the network edges. We place special focus on localized communications and services at the edge, which will improve user quality of experience (QoE) and alleviate congestion in the core of the network. Our goal is tighter integration of opportunistic and delay-tolerant communications with the core of the network, extending its reach toward universal coverage and enhancing operational reliability when the network infrastructure is unavailable or impaired. We aim to further integrate social awareness into the network by leveraging human users' contextual information and create a truly pervasive network. Toward this end, we are developing UMO-BILE: a universal, mobile-centric, and opportunistic communications architecture, which we present in the following sections. We first share our motivation and describe our vision. Then we provide some basic information about the key technologies enabling this vision before we finally unveil
The work in REF introduced a system that can pervasively operate in any networking environment and allows for the development of innovative applications by pushing services near to the edge of the network.
Connecting the Edges: A Universal, Mobile-Centric, and Opportunistic Communications Architecture
IEEE Communications Magazine
IEEE Communications Magazine
Computer Science