Designing for SCALP: Small Contributions of Autonomic Large Populations

Ioannis Stavrakakis
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

Draft Abstract

The Internet was a pioneering concept in several ways, including the
decentralization of the infrastructure 
and providing a fairly successful glue to the pieces contributed by typically
large organizations or 
enterprises, at least initially. The Future Internet will need to cope with a
trend towards further 
decentralization with increased uncertainty and autonomicity, not only with
respect to the traditional 
infrastructure but the networking services and mainly content, as well as cope
with the blurring between 
networks and services, new resource trade offs, etc. 

Some examples challenges: 

* How to cope with content proliferation? Web2.0 and other trends have lead to
  a proliferation of content producers. More than 90% of the content will be
  generated by small producers and be of low demand (SCALP). The ability to
  self-manage it is central to its survival.  Content should migrate properly
  to achieve efficient provision; its placement, advertisement and discovery
  should be facilitated by Future Internet. Major challenges are: distributed
  placement algorithms utilizing local demand and topology information and
  scalable and intelligent global network outreach for carrying out content
  advertisement/discovery.

* How to form networks to provide a service via independently owned resource
  contributions?  Future Internet infrastructure will likely be mostly
  contributed by large populations of resourceful users (SCALP). Cooperation
  among selfish entities is central to forming such infrastructures and
  mistreatment should be absent.

* How to cope with uncertainty of SCALP? How can -redundancy- offered by large
  populations help cope with inherent uncertainty associated with autonomic
  behaviors?

* How do design networking structures from SCALPs and how to -contain-  SCALPs
and design interfaces to the rest of the universe?

* How will the Small entity find a place in the Future Internet in the absence
  of a -social welfare-  mentality? Self-management, self-sustainability and
  resource contribution to gain its place will be necessary.

* The BW-centric Internet of the past will give its place to a
  multi-resource-enabled networking infrastructure. Design for inclusion of
  resource peculiarities and flexible resource trade offs.

*  -. etc-..