User centric networking and services: Part I [Guest Editorial]

COMMAG_GUEST_EDIT-Sofia.qxp_Guest Editorial 8/28/14 1:24 PM Page 18

GUEST EDITORIAL

USER CENTRIC NETWORKING AND SERVICES: PART I

Rute Sofia

U

Alessandro Bogliolo

Fikret Sivrikaya

Olivier Marce

David Valerdi

ser-centric networks (UCNs) are a recent architectural trend of self-organizing autonomic networks where the Internet end user cooperates by sharing network services and resources. UCNs are spontaneous and grassroots deployments of wireless architectures, ad hoc or infrastructured, often involving low-cost equipment. UCNs empower the end user as a new Internet stakeholder, not just as a consumer and producer of content. User-centric networking technologies can be applied to a wide range of scenarios, including: • Sharing subscribed broadband Internet access • Providing support for better Internet connectivity • Allowing the use of communication services even in the absence of reliable Internet access infrastructures • Assisting networking services based on user involvement for the detection and repair of communication problems and for the optimization of user experience The new role of an empowered end user is disruptive in several aspects: • In the end-to-end Internet paradigm, an end-user device will actively participate as a network element in addition to being an endpoint host. • In network boundaries of trust, these will need to be extended in a way that should mimic social behavior. • In service continuity, end-user devices should be capable of handling intermittent Internet connectivity as well as fast and transparent roaming between micro-operators. There is also the need to further understand wholesale models incorporating UCNs, as well as to understand the impact of UCNs in the context of standardization. Research on user-centric networking encompasses a diverse set of topics, including cooperation incentive models, dynamic trust management models, community detection and social interaction, distributed mobility management, human behavior and mobility prediction, resource management in spontaneous environments,

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Huiling Zhu

cooperative networking, market impact analysis of UCN integration, and virtual currency architectures and models. While there are many relevant works in the research literature falling under each of those domains, a more holistic approach is required for the UCN concept to materialize. This Feature Topic is the first part of a two-part series on recent surveys and results on user-centric networking research. It opens with an article by Iosifidis et al. on the incentive mechanisms for encouraging user engagement in user-provided networks (UPNs), which represents one of the fundamental application scenarios of the UCN concept. After a nice broad overview of the UPN concepts, the authors analyze design challenges, existing approaches, and open issues for incentive mechanisms. The second article, by Katsarakis et al., considers a different view of the UCN paradigm and presents a new user-centric reviewing system, u-map, that enables users to collect network measurements and subjective opinion scores about the performance of various services. The article discusses how u-map can be beneficial to network/service operators as well as regulators that audit the providers’ conformance to certain regulatory agreements. In the third article by Nunes et al., software defined networking (SDN) is investigated as the core technological enabler for cooperation between wireless nodes and capacity sharing services in UCNs. The article presents the requirements for enabling capacity sharing services in the context of UCNs with respect to resource discovery, node admission control, cooperation incentives, QoS, and security; it then discusses how SDN can aid in enabling such services. The authors also propose an SDN-enabled capacity sharing framework for UCNs. The last article of the first part of this Feature Topic, contributed by Xing et al., focuses on the routing issues in UCNs. The article studies the approach of exploiting human social interactions for UCN routing, presents an analysis of existing methods from the related research literature, and highlights some open research issues.

IEEE Communications Magazine • September 2014