ICIN 2013 Programme

13:00 - 15:00

Tutorial 1: Network Functions Virtualization Demystified
Igor Faynberg (Alcatel-Lucent & Stevens Institute of Technology, USA), Hui-Lan Lu (Alcatel-Lucent, USA)

15:00 - 15:30

Coffee Break

15:30 - 18:30

Tutorial 2: WebRTC & Carrier Network: a Technical Overview & Market Context
Dean Bubley (Disruptive Analysis, UK), Tim Panton (Tropo, UK)

19:00 - 20:30

Welcome Networking Reception
Sponsored by

08:45 - 11:00

ICIN 2013 Opening and Keynotes
Chair: Stuart Sharrock (Telemates, UK), Bruno Chatras (Orange Labs, France)

Welcome Address: Leveraging Cultural Heritage through ICTs
Telecom Italia's activities on leveraging cultural heritage through ICTs involves creating a big data environment through digitalization of a large mass of historical documents and pictures.
Roberto Minerva, Telecom Italia Future Centre, Italy

Architecture Evolution – Some Observations on Recent Developments
Four emerging technologies will have a significant impact on the evolution of communications networks. Firstly, software defined networking (SDN): the art of potentially simplifying the IP transport network and making it more agile in responding to the varying needs that the higher control layers place on it. Secondly, service exposure: the means by which the capabilities of the telco network(s) can be made available to a much wider set of developers than the classical specialists. Thirdly, the emergence of analytics tools (and their connection to big data technologies): the ability to extract knowledge and insights by studying the information that flows through the networks. And finally, underpinning all of the above: cloud based deployment technologies. How do these four areas interrelate and interwork?
Ulf Olsson, Senior Expert, Ericsson Group Function Technology, Sweden

New Security Challenges Facing Cloud and Mobile Expansion
The proliferation of new devices with 4G capabilities is driving a huge expansion in the use of new devices worldwide. These millions of new devices demand massive amounts of broadband as well as rapid service development and the delivery of powerful cloud services. New security challenges are emerging. Is there an argument for telcos to reduce the capabilities of the new mobile devices? Should the cloud be an open standard or should each telco deploy their own flavour of cloud services for the protection of their customers and their business?
Juan M. Velasco, CEO, Aiuken Solutions, Spain

Strategies for the Creation of New Network Services
As part of efforts to improve our research and development (R&D) activities; we need to speed up our service-related R&D. This presentation introduces our approaches for this, from visualizing services to conducting trials on R&D cloud environment called XFARM. The presentation covers some frameworks for service creation that we use, and it also shows some innovative service examples using video experience.
Naoki Uchida, Vice President, Executive Producer, Research and Development Planning Department, NTT Service Evolution Laboratories, Japan

11:00 - 11:30

Coffee Break

11:30 - 13:00

S1: Network Functions on the Move
Chair: Marc Cheboldaeff (T-Systems International, Germany)

Best Presentation – Day 1
The Virtual Set-Top Box: On the Shift of IPTV Service Execution, Service & UI Composition Into the Cloud
Alexandra Mikityuk; Oliver Friedrich; Jean-Pierre Seifert (Telekom Innovation Laboratories, Germany)

This paper introduces the concept of the so-called virtual Set-Top Box (vSTB). The idea of the vSTB represents a novel and fundamental change in the creation and delivery of media services as IP Television (IPTV), by shifting most of the service execution environment - e.g. the Web browser - to a Cloud infrastructure. This paper describes the overall approach of this idea, addresses and identifies the technical challenges, which emerged in a corresponding project in the Telekom Innovation Laboratories, and provides a wide theoretical basis for further research on Cloud service execution environments.

Best Paper – Runner-up
Manifesto of Edge ICT Fabric
Antonio Manzalini; Roberto Minerva (Telecom Italia, Italy); Eliezer Dekel; Yoav Tock (IBM Haifa Research Lab, Israel); Ernest Kaempfer (Intel Corporation, Italy); Wouter Tavernier; Koen Casier; Sofie Verbrugge; Didier Colle (Ghent University, Belgium); Franco Callegati; Aldo Campi; Walter Cerroni (University of Bologna, Italy); Ricard Vilalta; Raul Muñoz; Ramon Casellas; Ricardo Martinez (CTTC, Spain); Noel Crespi (Institut Mines-Télécom, France); Nicola Mazzocca; Elisa Maini (Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Italy)

Technology advances are making available huge amounts of processing, storage, networking capabilities at the edge (i.e., up to End-Users premises) of current networks. It is argued that these trends, coupled with new emerging paradigms such as Software Defined Networks, will impact deeply the evolution of future networks, allowing to design highly flexible architectures at the edge capable of creating a galaxy of new ICT business opportunities. This paper presents this vision by proposing a so-called "manifesto of edge ICT fabric": the sheer number of nodes, devices and systems being deployed at the edge, up to Users' premises, will create an ICT fabric offering an enormous processing and storage power. Using this ICT fabric, which is closer to the Users, for executing network functions and services will bring several advantages, both in term of improved performance and cost savings (e.g., determined by the removal of middle-boxes). It is argued that incentives, cooperation and competition at the edge will boost the long-term value of networks: like in ecosystems, where evolution select the winning species, winning services will succeed, grow, and promote further investments, while losing ideas will fade away.

What LTE Policy Control Features Can Operators Execute to Differentiate Themselves From OTT Players?
Jonathan Hart; Ruth Brown (BT, UK)

Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) are currently facing challenging times. With flat revenues and intense competition from 'Over The Top' (OTT) providers, they are searching for new opportunities that will enable revenue growth. The impending migration towards LTE presents a number of challenges as well as opportunities, especially in the area of Policy Control. The Evolved Packet Core (EPC) architecture provides an enhanced feature set in the Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF) which, coupled with the advanced capabilities of the LTE radio access technology (e.g. improved speed, latency etc.), opens up a wealth of potential possibilities within this domain that operators may need to consider. This paper aims to explore those areas in more detail and discuss what LTE Policy Control features operators can implement in order to generate revenue growth and differentiate themselves from OTT providers.

13:00 - 14:00

Tuesday Lunch

14:00 - 15:45

S2: WebRTC
Chair: Anders Lundqvist (Oracle Corporation, Sweden)

Catalysing the Success of WebRTC for the Provision of Advanced Multimedia Real-Time Communication Services
Luis López Fernández; Miguel París Díaz; Raul Benítez Mejías (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain); Francisco Javier López; José Antonio Santos (Naeva Tec, Spain)

WebRTC is a solid initiative for building a standardized and interoperable real-time multimedia communication technology fully integrated on the WWW. Opportunity or threat, WebRTC is relevant enough for catching the attention of all market stakeholders. In this paper, we analyze the current status of WebRTC and show how creating a number of server-side enablers could push this technology beyond just peer-to-peer communications and make it attractive for professional applications on the long tail. We create an open source based server infrastructure providing those enablers and contribute the code to the community. To conclude, we describe how a simple API can be used for accessing the media capabilities of such infrastructure.

Some WebRTC Opportunities for RCS
Romain Carbou (Orange Labs, France)

WebRTC, browser-to-browser communication technology, has on short term a desktop strategy, which will unleash its potential in 2013/2014. It is a great opportunity for Telco's to achieve a promise of service continuity for the RCS standard. But general disintermediation patterns and WebRTC going mobile are a serious mid-term challenge for operators.

Office in the Cloud: Web-based Cloud Platform for Telcos Services
Masafumi Suzuki; Kentaro Shimizu; Shinyo Muto; Naoki Uchida (NTT, Japan)

In this paper, we propose a new cloud platform architecture that enables telco services to be provided in a location-free, device-free use form. This architecture enables users to use the interactive services developed through use of WebRTC and other Web technologies; it only requires users to have an HTML5-powered device and network reachability. Web developers can develop applications using functions such as Communication as a Service (CaaS) as cloud plugins, and deploy and execute them on the cloud platform. This architecture comprises the Software as a Service (SaaS) + CaaS cloud platform for HTML5 supported by a web browser and an application development toolkit. We developed a prototype of the proposed architecture and the services executed on it. We also evaluated the services in terms of feasibility and quality.

Best Paper – Runner-up
WebRTC, the Day After
Emmanuel Bertin; Sébastien Cubaud; Stephane Tuffin; Stéphane Cazeaux (Orange Labs, France); Noel Crespi; Maria Victoria Beltran (Institut Mines-Télécom, France)

The WebRTC technology is gaining more and more attention in the Telco world. After having detailed this technology and its stakes, we remind in this paper some limits of the current architectures for conversational services, and we expose how webRTC could be used by Telcos. Two scenarios are possible: Extending the IMS footprint and introducing a new control plane.

15:45 - 16:15

Coffee break

16:15 - 18:00

S3: Network Transformation using Cloud
Chair: Dan Fahrman (Ericsson, Sweden)

Cloud-enabled NGN Architecture with Discovery of End-to-End QoS Resources
Silvana Greco Polito; Tommaso Nicoletti (Università degli Studi di Enna Kore, Italy); Vincenzo Maniscalco (Università di Palermo, Italy)

Cloud computing offers remote resources on top of which users can deploy their own services, as well as ready to use services. Computing resources located in different sites and belonging to multiple providers can be used for a service. One requirement for the user to get access to cloud services is being connected with the remote computing resources. Similarly, interworking between computing resources located in different sites requires network resources connecting them. Therefore, cloud services can be thought as composed of computing and networking resources. Quality of service (QoS) constraints can be posed on both of them. This is motivating request for cloud architectures able to discover remote computing and QoS networking resources. Design of such architecture is still an open issue. In this paper, we provide a proposal for it. We leverage on the existing Next Generation Network architecture, which was designed for IP services, and propose extensions to address the cloud provisioning requirements. The proposed extensions are about, control and transport layer functions for automatic discovery of computing and QoS networking resources, respectively. Simulation results show scalability of the discovery model in networks with increasing size and number of cloud providers.

A Topology-Aware Adaptive Deployment Framework for Elastic Applications
Matthias Keller; Manuel Peuster; Christoph Robbert; Holger Karl (University of Paderborn, Germany)

Deploying multi-tier or stateful applications across thousands of geographically distributed cloud sites promises quality-of-service improvements and cost reductions. We present a framework for plug-in a wide range of adaptations, a steering system to aid applications to react to changes, two novel concepts to further improve adaptations, and an Open Source toolkit using our testbed for evaluation.

Towards Cross-Industry Information Infrastructure Provisioning - A Resource-Based Perspective
Felix Limbach; Hannes Kuebel; Ruediger Zarnekow (TU Berlin, Germany); Michael Dueser (Telekom Innovation Laboratories, Germany)

The availabilty of future-proof information infrastructure is widely associated with economic growth and social prosperity. However, migrating legacy information infrastructures to the future is said to come along with high investment costs. In this paper we assess how cross-industry cooperation between utility and telecommunication companies can contribute to the utilization of synergies in information infrastructure provisioning. For this purpose we employ a joint case study and grounded theory approach that is based on expert interviews with managing experts from telecommunication companies accounting for more than 75 percent of today's German broadband market. Based on coding techniques we identify and value central concepts that contribute to cross-industry infrastructure provisioning. Our results indicate that utility companies can foster cooperation by focusing on resources related to the deployment and maintenance of physical infrastructure. In contrast activities and assets related to network or service operation can be cooperation inhibitors.

Designing Carrier's Online Storage "Family Cloud" for Enhancing Telecom Home Services
Atsushi Fukayama; Hideaki Iwamoto; Manabu Motegi; Hiroyuki Sato; Hikaru Takenaka; Megumu Tsuchikawa; Noriyoshi Uchida; Michio Shimomura; Naoki Uchida (NTT, Japan)

Many fixed-line carriers are providing online storage service, which stores user's data through their broadband access network, as a typical application service that utilizes their network's advantage such as wide bandwidth. However, many of those services do not offer unique service scenarios different from Over-The-Top personal online storage services. In order to realize carrier's online storage services that utilize carrier's advantages and enhance existing telecom services, we propose a concept of "family cloud" logically directly connected to a household via a fixed broadband access line. The tight coupling of family cloud and carrier's network facilitates new in-home online storage use cases including enhancement of existing home telecom services. In this report, we clarify family cloud's concept, extensively investigate its service scenarios, design a functional architecture that can cover the scenarios, and show three service prototypes for the concept verification.

20:00 - 23:00

Gala Dinner

08:45 - 10:30

S4: Improving Customer Experience
Chair: Max Michel (France Telecom, France)

Real-Time Privacy-Preserving Cobrowsing with Element Masking
Jorn Franke; Bin Cheng (NEC Labs Europe, Germany)

Collaborative Web Browsing (cobrowsing) becomes more and more popular in commercial solutions. Cobrowsing allows different users to share a synchronized common view on a web page as well as sharing the interactions, such as mouse movements, highlighting text or mouse clicks, on this web page with each other. This makes it interesting for a wide range of use cases, such as customer relationship management, call center or online sales. Nevertheless existing solutions are vulnerable to man in the middle attacks by the cobrowsing server when using the secure hypertext transfer protocol (HTTPS) and they leak private data of the user to other third parties, which may potentially misuse them. We present in this paper a solution to these issues by letting a user act as proxy between the web application provider and other users. This enables the user (1) to control which web application data is propagated to whom (2) to enforce privacy policies upon private data within a cobrowse session. We present our implementation, which does not rely on browser plugins or extensions, but only on existing web standards.

A Web Synchronization Method for Supporting Real and Non-Real-Time Web Communication
Kazuyuki Tasaka; Tomohiko Ogishi; Akira Idoue (KDDI R&D Labs, Japan)

We propose a web synchronization method that shares the same web page and operations (e.g. button click) by browsers among users in not only real-time but also non-real-time. This method also synchronizes output time of a scene in streaming content (e.g. voice and video) and output time of other content (non-streaming content including output result of operations at the scene). Conventional methods achieve a web synchronization to supplement voice/video communication with the support of operations in real-time for services such as call center and e-learning. An operator can remotely operate a user's browser instead of users. However, users cannot receive the services when support by an operator is unavailable. Therefore, we propose a novel method for enabling the non-real-time web communication. The proposed method achieves the web synchronization by automatically adding synchronization information to a web content that specifies the time when operation is executed. The timing for synchronization is calculated according to the output time of streaming content and communication environments (network delay and rendering performance). We implemented a prototype system and measured the difference in the output time between browsers. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves synchronization within 300-400 ms (target time is 400 ms).

Wallet-on-Wheels Using Vehicle's Identity for Secure Mobile Money
Rebecca Copeland (Core Viewpoint Limited, UK); Noel Crespi (Institut Mines-Télécom, France)

Mobile Money is poised to sweep the developed world while cars are becoming much smarter. Combine the two - and you get cars that 'own' a wallet. We propose a car-centric, not user-centric service that enables cars to have pre-pay and subscription accounts for car-related purchases and for linking to financial services. We propose using the cars' communications capability and the car's securely stored credentials to offer enhanced security, which is needed for a financial service platform. We propose strengthening the authentication procedure with the 'Twin-Action' method using both car-based and phone-based authentication, and the service authorization with the 'Twin-Step' confirmation method.

A User-Centric Context-Aware Mobile Assistant
Bachir Chihani; Emmanuel Bertin (Orange Labs, France); Noel Crespi (Institut Mines-Télécom, France)

Since the early days of smartphones, there has been a phenomenal increase in the quantity and quality of mobile applications. Most of these applications aim to answer one specific need (like SMS for messaging) but do not coordinate their execution as most of the time they are made by separate developers. Composing and coordinating these applications should increase their benefit especially if the end-user is involved in the composition task. In addition, the use of the user contextual information should make the execution of the composed application more adaptive. This paper introduces a mobile personal assistant that empowers users to define rules for context-aware application composition. Such rules should enable the cooperation of applications in order to invoke the right action at the appropriate situation. A simplified rule language based on natural language is used to specify the adaptation rules. In addition, this mobile assistant offers the possibility to involve users in resolving ambiguity that may be faced when interpreting such rules, in defining high-level context by tagging other users, objects or any events. The implementation of this mobile assistant demonstrates how such approaches may facilitate the adoption of context-aware computing in everyday life.

10:30 - 11:00

Coffee break

11:00 - 12:30

S5: Business Models
Chair: Stefan Uellner (T-Systems International, Germany)

Roaming Unbundling - Challenges and Opportunities
Rogier Noldus (Ericsson, Germany); Lennart Norell (Ericsson, Sweden)

The European Committee mandates that from July 1, 2014, Mobile network operators (MNO) shall offer the possibility to other parties, referred to as Alternative roaming provider (ARP) to offer 'roaming services'. When a subscriber of a national MNO, referred to as Domestic service provider (DSP) in this context, travels abroad, that person should be entitled to receive voice, data and SMS and MMS from the ARP. Hereto, the end-user has to sign up with the ARP beforehand. Users shall also be entitled to use Local breakout (LBO) when traveling abroad. Data connection (mobile IP connectivity) may be obtained from the Visited mobile network operator (VMNO), through local GGSN / PDGw. Hereto, the end-user has to sign up with the local LBO operator. ARP and LBO present specific challenges for MNOs, but also opportunities for differentiation.

Constructing a Multi-Sided Business Model for a Smart Horizontal IoT Service Platform
Frank Berkers (TNO, The Netherlands); Marc Roelands (Alcatel-Lucent, Belgium); Freek Bomhof; Thomas Bachet; Martin van Rijn; Wietske Koers (TNO, The Netherlands)

In order to realize a viable business ecosystem in the Internet of Things (IoT), we investigated how a smart horizontal IoT service platform can bring value and economies of scale to all required ecosystem stakeholders. By means of an example application domain case, this paper constructs a multi-sided business model illustrating how such viable business ecosystem can be achieved leveraging the key platform features.

Recommendation as a Service (RaaS): New Challenges for, and Evaluation Metrics of Recommender Systems
Gerald Eichler (Telekom Innovation Laboratories, Germany); Karl-Heinz Lüke (Leibniz FH School of Business, Germany)

Advertisement turns into recommendation, web services become independent apps, and mobile devices enforce context awareness. Recommendation as a Service (RaaS) turns into an independent application-based business. By analyzing the trends, the paper introduces a multi-dimensional evaluation scheme to characterize recommender systems. The chart is applied to different research implementations, emphasizing their specifics. Requirements and trends for the future are derived.

12:30 - 14:00

Lunch

14:00 - 15:30

S6: New Architectures for Service Delivery
Chair: Bernard Vilain (Cassidian, France)

Best Presentation – Day 2
Moving to Content-Centric Networks
Barry Crabtree; Steve Appleby; Tim Stevens; Brahim Allan; Mike E Nilsson (BT, UK)

Content Centric Networks, having been designed for the shift in the focus of the Internet from being a point-to-point IP network to a Content Store-and-Forward network based on naming the content, not the location - allowing content caching to be a fundamental part of the network infrastructure. This paper projects to a future with a Tele-Content provider based on a Content Centric Network infrastructure and shows how the links between users, applications, and service providers changes to support this new type of network infrastructure.

An Approach to Expose M2M Services Over OMA Next Generation Service Interface
Asma Elmangoush; Hakan Coskun (TU Berlin, Germany); Thomas Magedanz; Niklas Blum (Fraunhofer Institute FOKUS, Germany)

Context provisioning refers to the trend of gathering, transporting and processing context in order to promote context awareness in Future Internet services. Context awareness enables services to become adaptive, personalized, and accessible in dynamically changing environments. In various scenarios of Internet of things (IoT), connected objects shall be able to negotiate and adapt to their environment. Consequently, the context awareness is an essential feature for Machine-to-Machine (M2M) platforms in order to realize the IoT and enable the management of Context providers (connected objects) and Context information. This paper proposed an abstraction layer to interface ETSI compatible M2M platforms with NGSI Context Management standards interface. The aim of this approach is to promote M2M services adaptation to the ambient environment.

Best Paper
Hybrid Composition of Telecom and Internet Services: The Telecom Operator Perspective
Pierpaolo Baglietto; Massimo Maresca; Michele Stecca (CIPI, Italy); Corrado Moiso (Telecom Italia, Italy)

The evolution of the Internet toward the "Internet of Services" has created the need to explore new platforms that support the creation and the execution of Composite Services, i.e., of applications that combine services. In this paper we explore Service Composition in three different domains, namely in the domain of telecommunication networks, in the Internet domain, and in hybrid Telco/Internet domains. We devote our attention to Telcos and more specifically to the Telco Service Delivery Platform (SDP), which is gradually incorporating support to Service Composition and to the cooperation with services in the Internet domain. We first propose a classification of the existing Service Composition approaches based on the role covered by Telcos in service delivery and then compare the Telco view, according to which the Composite Services are executed by the SDP, against the Internet view, according to which the Composite Services are executed by a platform operated by an external service provider located in the Internet. Finally, we describe the architecture of a scalable Service Composition engine integrated with the Telco SDP.

15:30 - 16:00

Coffee break

16:00 - 17:00

Conference Review
Chair: Stuart Sharrock (Telemates, UK), Bruno Chatras (Orange Labs, France)
Summary of presentations and discussions

Agile telco networks for innovative services
Roberto Minerva (Telecom Italia, Italy)

The future of real-time communications
Dean Bubley (Disruptive Analysis, UK)

Best Paper awards

Best Presentation awards

17:30 - 18:30

Organ Recital
Church music by Girolamo Frescobaldi
Organist: Igor Faynberg
Parish Church of San Salvador