The ABCD project proposes to join behavioral analysis from social sciences with cutting-edge traffic engineering research from telecommunications, in order to define a flexible solution to a number of problems that are nowadays either not tackled at all or solved in a case-by-case reactive fashion. Current approaches to cope with traffic demand dynamics can only deal with massive displacements of people to specific places that are easily predictable in a long advance (e.g., a football match, New Year’s Eve), and consist of manually installing new physical access points at the geographical area of interest. However, daily massive displacements in urban areas dictated by human activity routines, as well as Cloud service mobility in the Internet, occur at timescales that do not allow a physical re-deployment of the access network equipment – and even less so in presence of non-predictable events that disrupt such routines. What is needed is a re- deployment of the network capacity (rather than of the physical equipment themselves) that is able to follow short-timescale traffic demand dynamics. To that end, a dynamic evaluation of the users’ mobility and content consumption is needed, that can be then leveraged for a proactive engineering of the Cloud instances close to the identified access points. That above is not a simple task, and many technology bricks need to be specified and produced in order to achieve this objective. Namely, the envisioned architecture requires:
- a distributed behavioral classification method for predicting jointly user macro-mobility and usages with an acceptable accuracy,
- a method to estimate the volume of users per access point over time, their behavioral typology and their usage typology (accessed services),
- the definition of mobile Cloud networking protocols jointly managing user and machine mobility to transparently migrate virtual machines to the places where users are.
These procedures are not currently deployed in access networks, but the current trend and technology context suggests that it is just a matter of time. It is therefore of paramount importance to position our research effort in this direction to be able to contribute to advances in technologies.
