Engineering Content-Centric Future Internet Applications

Abstract: The Internet as we know it today has sustained continuous evolution since its creation, radically changing means of communication and ways in which commerce is globally operated. From the World Wide Web to the two-way video calls, it has shifted the ways people communicate and societies function. The Internet itself was first conceived as a network that would enable the communication between multiple trusted and known hosts, but as the time passed, it has notably evolved. Due to the significant adoption of Internet-connected devices (phones, personal computers, tablets...), the initial device homogeneity has shifted towards an extremely heterogeneous environment in which many different devices consume and publish resources, also referred as services. As the number of connected devices and resources increases, it becomes critical to building systems that enable the autonomic publication, consumption, and retrieval of those resources. As the inherent complexity of systems continues to grow, it is essential to set boundaries to their achievable capabilities. The traditional approaches to network-based computing are not sufficient, and new reference approaches should be presented. In this context the Future Internet (FI) term emerges, a worldwide execution environment connecting large sets of heterogeneous and autonomic devices and resources. In such environments, systems leverage service annotations to fulfil emerging goals and dynamically organise resources based on interests. Although research has been conducted in those areas, active research is being carried out in the following areas: extensible machine-readable annotation of services, dynamic service discovery, architectural approaches for decentralised systems, and interest-focused dynamic service organisations. These concepts will be explained in the next section, as they will serve to contextualise the later presented problem statement and research questions.