The current strong divide between applications and the network control plane is desirable for many reasons; but a downside is that the network is kept in the dark regarding the ultimate purposes and intentions of applications and, as a result, is unable to optimize for these. An alternative approach, explored in this paper, is for applications to declare to the network their abstract intents and assumptions; e.g. "this is a Tweet", or "this application will run within a local domain". Such an enriched semantic has the potential to enable the network better to fulfill application intent, while also helping optimize network resource usage across applications. We refer to this approach as 'intent driven networking' (IDN), and we sketch an incrementally-deployable design to serve as a stepping stone towards a practical realization of the IDN concept within today's Internet.
The Experience-oriented network architecture (EONA) @cite_1 is one in which application and content providers as well as infrastructure operators exchange information from their respective control loops to improve user experience. We take inspiration from EONA, but are concerned about the viability of its approach. In a world where data is the new oil, we can not imagine such cooperative exchange of information happening between parties with sometimes conflicting interests @cite_22 . The authors do not provide a reasonable argument for how this would be realized.
@cite_1 @cite_22
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There is a growing recognition among researchers, industry practitioners, and service providers of the need to optimize user-perceived application experience. Network infrastructure owners (i.e., ISPs) have traditionally been left out of this equation, leading to repeated tussles between content providers and ISPs. In parallel, application providers have to deploy complex workarounds that reverse engineer the network's impact on application-level metrics. In this work, we make the case for EONA, a new network paradigm where application providers and network providers can collaborate meaningfully to improve application experience. We observe a confluence of technology trends that are enablers for EONA: the ability to collect large volumes of client-side application measurements, the emergence of novel "big data" platforms for real-time analytics, and new control plane capabilities for ISPs (e.g., SDN, IXPs, NFV). We highlight the challenges and opportunities in designing suitable EONA interfaces between infrastructure and application providers and EONA-enhanced control loops that leverage these interfaces to optimize user experience. In this work we present a middleware architecture for a mobile peer-to-peer content distribution system. Our architecture allows wireless content dissemination between mobile nodes without relying on infrastructure support. Contents are exchanged opportunistically when nodes are within communication range. Applications access the service of our platform through a publish subscribe interface and therefore do not have to deal with low-level opportunistic networking issues or matching and soliciting of contents. Our architecture consists of three key components. A content structure that facilitates dividing contents into logical topics and allows for efficient matching of content lookups and downloading under sporadic node connectivity. A solicitation protocol that allows nodes to solicit content meta-information in order to discover contents available at a neighboring node and to download content entries disjointedly from different nodes. An API that allows applications to access the system services through a publish subscribe interface. In this work we describe the design and implementation of our architecture. We also discuss potential applications and present evaluation results from profiling of our system.