Context
Telecommunication networks are ubiquitous in our daily life. The network ecosystem and its in- frastructure are increasingly complex with more and more involved actors and technologies which have to interoperate. This complexity is illustrated in the figure below, where the basic network paradigm with network operators simply sending content from/to end users has moved to a topology with many players having different roles and operating sometimes selfishly. A complete telecommunications system has to integrate traditional networks capabilities but also all other innovative Internet services into a single service platform. Selfishness of actors, heterogeneity of requests and technologies, interoperability of services and automation of decisions are major challenges to be tackled.
ERMINE wishes to deal with network operations management and the required associated monitoring and measurements and performance analysis. Operation network management deals with performance-based management, fault analysis, or the design of procedures and strategies for resource provisioning and quality-of-service fulfilment. On this management side, we aim at looking at the whole topic of networks economics, studying the best economic strategies of actors of the digital economy, their interactions and the potential need for regulation. We also want to address resource management through artificial intelligence for automated decision as another main research direction. On the measurement side, monitoring services of all sorts is a
major challenge for regulatory bodies to ensure a fair and legal behavior of providers, and is also of primary importance for providers themselves to optimize decisions; this often requires new modeling, analysis and artificial intelligence tools. This is detailed below.
