WhitepaperA Summary of the IEEE Communications Magazine

Article on Future Networks

Patrick Poullie, Martin Waldburger, Burkhard Stiller

University of Zürich, Department of Informatics (IFI), Communication Systems Group (CSG), Binzmühlestrasse 14, CH–8050 Zürich, Switzerland{poullie|waldburger}@ifi.uzh.ch

Abstract. This white paper summarizes ongoing efforts of members ofUZH’s Communication Systems Group within ITU-T’s Study Group 13 as partof SmartenIT and FLAMINGO work. In particular, the development of ITU-TRecommendation Y.FNsocioeconomic is presented in relation to an article thatwas recently published in the IEEE Communications Magazine.

The current issue of the IEEE Communications Magazine features an article [4] thatdescribes ITU-T’s standardization activities in Future Networks (FNs). This articletermed “Toward Future Networks: A Viewpoint from ITU-T” presents details of FNstandardization and focuses on ITU-T’s achieved results and future plans in this area.It describes FNs as “[...] networks to be deployed roughly in the 2015–2020 time-frame [...]” and states that ITU takes the top down as well as the bottom up approachto standardize these networks. The former approach is motivated by the fact that con-sensus on larger trends and issues, such as data explosion and environmental issues,exists. The article explicitly discusses ITU-T´s Recommendation Y.3001 [2] that de-scribes objectives and design goals for future networks (FNs). In particular, Y.3001identifies the four objectives (i) service awareness, (ii) data awareness, (iii) environ-mental awareness, and (iv) social and economic awareness, which are described bythe article as "[...] fundamental issues to which not enough attention was paid in de-signing current networks [...]”. The four objectives are refined by twelve design goals,that serve to achieve them. Because the article discusses these objectives and designgoals, it also introduces ITU-T Study Group 13 (SG13) [3], which has the lead for FNstandardization within ITU-T and therefore developed Y.3001.Since SG13 started its activities already in 2009, when the discussion of FNs was inan early stage, it was decided that “[...] it is very important to listen to the voices ofnot only ITU-T members, but also experts including researchers outside of ITU-T[...]”, as cited from the article. Due to this decision, members of the UZH delegation(coordinator of SmartenIT) support SG13’s standardization activities since 2011 andin particular develop recommendation Y.FNsocioeconomic, which is aimed at the so-cio-economic aware design of future network technology. Therefore Y.FNsocioeco-nomic proposes tussle analysis to achieve Y.3001’s fourth objective “Social and Eco-nomic Awareness”, which is described by the article as the “[...] aim to take into con-sideration social and economical aspects when realizing the [network] architecture.”

2 Patrick Poullie, Martin Waldburger, and Burkhard Stiller

The proposed tussle analysis methodology was developed by the SESERV project [6]to evaluate and address socio-economic factors during the design phase of (FN) tech-nology. It is proposed in Y.FNsocioeconomic to implement “Economic incentives”,which is a design goal necessary for the objective of social and economic awareness.As also named by the article, the other necessary design goal is “service universaliza-tion”. Since it was hitherto not included in Y.FNsocioeconomic, it was decided dur-ing the last SG13 meeting in March1, to also include it. However, input for an accord-ing section will not be provided by the UZH delegation but by other volunteering ex-perts, more knowledgeable about this area.When recommendations for the four objectives are discussed, the article names “mo-bility” as a recommendation related to service awareness and defines it as the “move-ment support of virtual resources including users and services”. This is highly rele-vant for SmartenIT, as the project declared “Global service mobility” as one of itsthree major scenarios and therefore may contribute achieved results to the develop-ment of ITU-T recommendations.The article’s section dedicated to recommendations related to socio-economic aware-ness states that “Network architecture indirectly but certainly affects society and busi-ness by providing the playing field for social activity and business [...]”, whereforeY.3001 also considers social and economic issues despite its technical focus. The sec-tion then explicitly names and discusses Y.FNsocioeconomic that is introduced as a“[...] framework to anticipate the socio-economic impact of the technology during itsdesign.” Subsequently, the document and accordingly tussle analysis is elaborated inmore detail whereupon the section concludes that the introduced methodology helpsto “[...] design a technology for FNs that is in line with the respective socio-economicdesign goals and objectives.”When the document discusses future plans, it is stated that, due to the rising rele-vance of standardization activities of FNs, SG13 decided to “divide the group in-volved in standardization of FNs into three groups”, that focus on (i) service aware-ness including SDN, (ii) data awareness, and (iii) environment and socio-economicawareness and short-term realization of FNs, respectively. Due to this structuralchange, it became necessary to house Y.FNsocioeconomic in one of these threegroups, in order to continue its development. This step was recently successfully tak-en by the UZH delegation in the last SG13 meeting in March. In particular, UZH pro-posed to continue the development of the document within ITU-T’s Q16/13, which isthe third of the newly established groups and addresses “Environmental and socio-economic sustainability in future networks and early realization of FN”. The group istherefore considered a perfect match for the further development of the document bythe UZH delegation. The article closes by acknowledging amongst others MartinWaldburger, who is UZH’s driving force in ITU-T engagements, for his “[...] workand contributions to the ITU-T FN activities.”The next editorial iteration for Y.FNsocioecomic will happen during SG13 Rappor-teur meeting in June 17-28, 2013, and during SG13 meeting in November 4-15, 2013.The UZH delegation, which is constituted by members of UZH’s Communication

1 http://www.smartenit.eu/news/itu-tstudygroup13meeting

Summary of the IEEE Communications Magazine Article on Future Networks 3

Systems Group1 (CSG), will provide contributions to these iterations that are to be de-veloped in the framework of SmartenIT’s [5,7,8] and FLAMINGO’s [1] socio-eco-nomic research facets. Furthermore, the CSG also evaluates potential to refine techni-cal SmartenIT and Flamingo research to be contributed to ITU-T recommendations.

References

1. The FLAMINGO Consortium: http://www.fp7-flamingo.eu/; last visited April 27, 2013.2. ITU-T, Telecommunication Standardization Sector of ITU: Y.3001: Future networks: Ob-

jectives and design goals; Recommendation ITU-T Y.3001, Pages 1-18, May 2011.3. ITU-T Study Group 13: http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/studygroups/2013-2016/13/Pages/de-

fault.aspx; last visited April 27, 2013.4. D. Matsubara, T. Egawa, N. Nishinaga, M.-K. Shin, A. Galis: Toward Future Networks: A

Viewpoint from ITU-T; IEEE Communications Magazine, Pages 112-118, Volume 51, Is-sue 3, 2013.

5. I. Papafili, D. Hausheer, P. Poullie,T. Bocek, J. Rueckert, S. Soursos, G. Stamoulis, B.Stiller, K. Wajda: SMARTenIT Cloud Traffic Management Approach and ArchitecturalConsiderations; Future Network & Mobile Summit 2013, 3 - 5 July 2013, Lisbon, Portu-gal, 2013.

6. The SESERV Consortium: http://www.seserv.org; last visited April 27, 2013.7. The SmartenIT Consortium: http://www.smartenit.eu; last visited April 27, 2013.8. B. Stiller, D. Hausheer, T. Hoßfeld: An Overview on a Socially-aware Management of New

Overlay Application Traffic Combined with Energy Efficiency in the Internet (SmartenIT);Future Internet Assembly 2013: Validated Results and New Horizons, Alex Galis, Anasta-sius Gavras (Eds.), Lecture Notes in Computer Science LNCS, Springer, Berlin, Germany,Vol. 7858, May 2013.

1 http://www.csg.uzh.ch/