An architectural approach towards Future Media Internet

Abstract

Internet is the most important information exchange means nowadays and has become the core communication environment, not only for business relations, but also for social and human interaction. Yet, the immense success of Internet has created even higher hopes and expectations for new immersive and real-time applications and services. However, there are no guarantees that the current Internet will be able to support them. To face the new requirements coming from these new applications and services, several architectural approaches have been proposed. Evolutionary and clean-slate approaches, based on content-centric architectures, have been proposed for meeting new requirements regarding media. This paper highlights the main architectural functions and presents a revolutionary protocol stack and a holistic architectural approach that targets Future Media Internet (FMI). Among the architectural functions and the holistic approach, the paper presents solutions to overcome the current content delivery limitations, moving intelligence in the network and converting it into a content oriented/centric network, that goes well beyond current CDNs; supporting the functionalities for producing, publishing, caching, finding and consuming content; and a novel Future Media Internet protocol stack and network architecture.