Measuring
A proper management of network services and operations cannot be effective without measure- ment/monitoring and without the analysis of relevant metrics. Indeed, decision making cannot be realized without knowledge and data on the past, present and even future status of the activity. This is typically the case for agile capacity planning and resource sharing for which usage needs to be computed and even predicted. This is a challenge for which tools coming from AI are very promising. Another relevant example of challenge we want to put forward and will closely investi- gate is measurements for regulation purposes, in relation with our activity on network economics: defining regulation rules means designing measurement procedures to verify that the rules are fol- lowed. It is required to monitor a neutral behavior of ISPs as expected from the Net neutrality principles. While there exist a few tools towards that goal, they are actually all devoted to very specific hindrances to neutrality (blocking, degradation) for specific types of flows or traffic; a major challenge would be to detect any type of non-authorized behavior. Many other actors of the ICT economy, if not all, are barely monitored while an unfair behavior could be seen as harm- ing end users and society. To name some noticeable examples, we can cite CDNs which cache some content at the edge of the network and could unfairly propose a better quality to selected customers, or search engines who can prioritize the web. In all those cases, different and specific techniques have to be designed to analyze and detect unexpected behaviors. We will aim at designing mathematical techniques, mostly based on statistics and again AI for measurement, and at developing tools.
Similarly, managing resources and operations calls for evaluating (measuring) the impact of decisions to determine the most appropriate ones. Modeling and performance evaluation tech- niques are appropriate and useful solutions at a low cost, without the need to build and run the real system. While we have in the group a long experience on performance evaluation, new challenges keep popping up due to new types of services translated into new problems to be modeled and an- alyzed through performance evaluation tools, and adaptations or extensions of existing techniques for better decision making. They usually require to develop new appropriate network metrics to assess network service operations effectiveness. Illustrative examples we start being interested in are blockchains. The popularity of blockchain lies in the introduction of the concept of a public distributed ledger shared by all participants of the system without relying on a centralized au- thority. This distributed ledger records all the transactions between parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way. In order to enjoy higher throughput and self-adaptivity to transac- tions demand in ICT, it requires the development of a new architecture and thus specific modeling and analysis techniques.
