Towards Future Networks

The Telecom industry is currently facing drastic changes which are shaping a new landscape in the ICT domain. Huge progress has allowed the development of new usage and has favored the emergence of new services and applications in all domains, from data services and content delivery to M2M applications (e.g. e-health services) and social networks. This evolution has resulted in high data rate demands from users/applications and network operators need to develop innovative solutions to cope with mobile and fixed data explosion and drastic multiplication of connected objects, and to meet performance expectations while external constraints such as regulation, sustainable development become more stringent. Though evolutionary solutions are being implemented to face the current trend, new models and solutions are being analyzed to overcome limits imposed by current technology. As the Internet progressively replaces other communication networks and becomes increasingly important for society at large, the need to address a number of significant deficiencies of an architecture designed more than 30 years ago becomes more and more pressing. New architectural principles and protocols are then necessary to be developed to consider the evolution of traffic characteristics together progress in radio/optical technologies and in processing /storage capabilities. Since they lead to huge investments, it is essential to envision solutions are flexible enough to anticipate future usage evolution and to assess operational efficiency. This talk presents some of the current research challenges in networking areas, i.e. :

• Information-centric networking, which represents a new paradigm for content dissemination and storage that is mainly based on named objects ;
• Programmable networking, which allows for flexible and dynamic resources allocation through open interfaces and network virtualization capabilities ;
• Autonomic networking, which simplifies network operations through self-organized/optimized management of heterogeneous resources.