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An applications perspective into the Future Internet
Journal of Network and Computer Applications 36 (2013) 249–254
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Journal of Network and Computer Applications journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jnca
An applications perspective into the Future Internet a,n ¨ Pekka Jappinen , Renata Guarneri b, Luis M. Correia c a b c
Lappeenranta University of Technology, Information technology, Skinnarilankatu 31, 53850 Lappeenranta, Finland Fondazione Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy Instituto Superior Te´cnico/Instituto de Telecomunicac- o~ es, Technical University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal
a r t i c l e i n f o
abstract
Article history: Received 7 March 2012 Received in revised form 22 June 2012 Accepted 20 August 2012 Available online 31 August 2012
The building of the Future Internet is well on its way with many research projects and experimental development activities in different parts of the works. However the debate over different approaches is still ongoing. Much of the comparison is concentrating on the different technical capabilities, however, very little effort has been put on finding out how such capabilities will actually be used by the different stakeholders and in particular by users and service providers. Decisions such as whether to take an evolutionary step with TCP/IP, start to use cellular protocols, or develop something new, should be based on realistic and validated user scenarios clearly highlighting what might be needed in the future and indicating a prioritised roadmap. As the Future Internet is needed for supporting new applications and services, it is natural that the requirements for Future Internet should come from the future applications. In this paper, we take a look at a likely future to see what kind of applications can be expected. We then analyse some potential future applications trying to understand the key features the Future Internet should support in order to meet key challenging requirements. Finally, we compare the requirements with the existing Future Internet research, in order to see how they match to each other. & 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Future Internet Applications Networking Internet of Things Security
1. Introduction Future Internet (FI) is a concept encompassing several technology areas, which is receiving a great deal of attention in the research world. As of now, there is no clear vision or agreement with regard to what such network of the future will allow, and which capabilities it will offer. It is still even under debate whether we should take either an evolutionary or a revolutionary approach on the building of the FI, although in many cases there is now a tendency to reconcile the two approaches, looking at evolution with the aim of having solutions in the short term, while a clean slate is considered for the long term approach. At the same time several national and international Future Internet research programs provide funding for the research projects that focus on development of the Future Internet and hopefully answer to the needs we have in the future. Current research related to the FI focuses on the technical capabilities, and features such as personalisation, context-awareness, Internet of Things (IoT) (CERP, 2009), cloud computing and networking, virtualisation, and content based networking. Lots of potential and new opportunities are seen in these technological advancements, and lots of effort has been put on the research in each of these areas. However, the effort put on the technology
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Corresponding author. Tel.: þ358 5 621 11. ¨ E-mail address: Pekka.Jappinen@lut.fi (P. Jappinen).
1084-8045/$ - see front matter & 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2012.08.009
research is in vain unless there are applications and services that will actually use of these developed novel capabilities. While developing technology can open up new ideas for applications, visionary applications can identify new requirements for the FI to fulfil. Understanding the requirements of future applications and services may, in turn, drive research in the right technological direction, where business potential exists. In this paper, we take a look at potential future applications through a single futuristic scenario based on the visions of the leading edge applications work group of EU’s eMobility technology platform. This scenario showcases the requirements that go beyond the capabilities of the current Internet. After the scenario description, we take a closer look at the different applications therein, and look on their effect on three different categories: interaction with user, connectivity and networking, and social aspects. We show why the presented applications are not yet feasible, and describe what will be needed from the Future Internet to make such a scenario a reality. Finally, we compare their requirements to the current technological research to identify the research areas that are important from the envisioned future applications perspective and draw some conclusions.
2. Related work Applications within the FI have been previously addressed by a number of authors, not only in various papers in the open
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literature, but also in several R&D projects, namely those within the European Commission framework. ¨ ¨ The authors in Schonw alder et al. (2009) identify some services, after which they list requirements concerning network and service management. Distributed storage with guarantees is mentioned, i.e., the storage of personal data in fully distributed networks; complete life replay is foreseen, taking advantage of the fact that people will record large portions of their life using the already available microphones and cameras in many devices, and that enough storage will become available in the network; in the health sector, services related to monitoring devices and advanced sensors embedded into everyday objects are addressed, enabling medical doctors to follow patients or to provide fast help in case of emergency; finally, personalised and mixed-reality entertainment is described, in a perspective of a mixture of real-world artifacts with virtual world ones, e.g., online radio stations providing the music that best matches people activities, as well as mixed-reality interfaces will enable new ways to participate in massively multiplayer online games. In a book dedicated to future mobile Internet (Raychaudhuri and Gerla, 2011), some scenarios are established, out of which applications are identified. These scenarios encompass individual wireless devices interfacing with the Internet (mobile computing), constellations of wireless devices (ad hoc networks), and pervasive systems and sensor networks (sensor nets). The applications list streaming of live sport events, seamlessly available to the user, communications in between cars and to the infrastructure, enabling collision avoidance and traffic management, and sensor and actuator systems for real-time control of physical world objects. An overview of projects in Europe is presented in Stuckmann and Zimmermann (2009), where some ideas are addressed. Prosumers (people acting simultaneously as producers and consumers of content) are mentioned as one of the key trends, and the Internet of Things, related to applications involving real-world objects, as well as business applications based on networkassisted machine-to-machine interaction, is also addressed. Besides general overviews of applications, other authors address specific sectors as well. An example is Papadimitratos et al. (2009), in which vehicular applications are described, e.g., infrastructure-based roadside equipment warning, safe distance and speed, collision mitigation, collaborative warning, blind spot and rear detection, lane support, side crash, and lane change assistant, lust to name a few. Still, most of the literature is dedicated network architectures, and related matters, which is not the approach of the current paper.
the location of several bicycle repair companies. The results are shown in his data glasses and his headset starts giving additional information: ‘‘Abbys bicycle repair is nearest to you and is generally respected. Your friend Benny highly recommends Bike from Mike, which is only 100 m farther away. Based on the 3D image of your bicycle, both places have the capability to fix your bike. Do you want to hear Bennys story about his bike repair?’’ This information is enough for John this time, and he selects Bike from Mike, after which he gets a guiding voice through his headset. While John is finding his way to Bike from Mike, textual information is added over the objects and buildings that John sees through his data glasses. When crossing streets, he gets warnings about cars nearby. Suddenly his glasses point to a red dot on his left and at the same time his left hand data glove provides slight pressure, indicating danger to his left. There is a woman walking her dog, and John is very allergic to dogs, so he changes his walking route a bit to avoid problems. While walking, John passes by an advertisement board. The board realises there is a hockey fan within its vicinity, and informs the latest results with an in-depth analysis of the game, which can be obtained from an electronic newspaper from results’r’us. As John finally enters the store, his jacket turns off its internal warming, and starts the cooling cycle, so that John is not going to sweat while being in the store.
4. The challenges for Future Internet In order for the above describe scenario to be a reality, several technical advancements and challenges need to be addressed. Based on an analysis of the scenario, an attempt has been made at identifying the key characteristics that should feature as part of the FI. This section provides a description of the different challenges identified. A categorisation in three groups has been chosen for the description. It should be noted that the categories are not fully orthogonal, and that many of the identified challenges may be classified and addressed from different viewpoints. The first ones are the challenges related to the varying user interfaces that will be used in the FI. The second area of key challenges covers those related to connectivity and networking. Requirements in these areas will impact on the core infrastructure of the FI; it is important that such requirements be addressed in a coherent manner, to ensure that FI applications and services can be offered seamlessly and reliably across different network domains. Lastly, we point out the challenges related to security, privacy, and trust being an orthogonal layer. 4.1. Interacting with users
3. Scenario The following scenario illustrates some of the applications that may be foreseen for the FI, which have been selected so that they point out the applications perspective for what are the challenges that need to be solved. This is just a subset of the multiple ideas existing at the Strategic Applications Agenda developed within eMobility (Ladeira, 2010). John is walking in the city. His new intelligent wear is connected to the Internet and ready to provide multi-modal information to him whenever required. Today, John is looking for a bicycle repair shop. He has taken with him his camera, where he has some images of the broken bicycle; the camera connects to the Internet in order to get a 3D image of the broken bike. After that, John turns on his microphone and says: ‘‘Where is the nearest bicycle repair shop?’’ The request is turned into text format and transmitted to an Internet search engine that returns
In 1991, Mark Weiser envisioned the world of ubiquitous computing, where computers are everywhere and embedded in every object, but are hidden from the user: People no longer make use of computers but rather appliances that may or may not contain computers (Weiser, 1991). A similar fate should happen to Internet. In the FI, networking will disappear and become invisible for users; people will just use applications and services, unaware of whether they rely on networking or not. For the network connectivity, the current process for selecting a proper network technology (e.g., Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or UMTS), finding devices, hotspot/network, selecting a service provider, establishing the connection, and authenticating to network is too cumbersome. The burden of connectivity issues moves from user to the applications. After all, users are not interested in connection details, but rather want to get relevant information, useful applications and helpful services.
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The feasibility of the services John uses in the scenario, rely heavily on the invisibility of networking. Many of the automated information services would not be useful, if the user would have to remember to manually create wireless connections. These automated services using FI will be used via a variety of everyday items, like intelligent clothes or bicycles. This will put also a heavy burden on the user interface and interaction design. The services and applications of FI should have simple and intuitive interfaces that everyone is capable of using. Multi-modal interfaces require additional hardware, like microphones, and for each modality, a single source should be enough, rather than implementing them for every gadget; controlling multiple microphones on different items, allowing voice based control, can easily become cumbersome for users. As single sources will provide the modality data to several devices and applications, the communication and interoperability between a variety of gadgets is going to be important. As the amount of information sources, applications and services steadily grows, the task for finding meaningful ones without help becomes harder and harder. Indeed, it is not acceptable that users have to through pages of text to find the desired information. Hence, we need more descriptive data, i.e., metadata, about the things we have in the network to help devices to ease the selection process for users. Properly described data is also important for applications that rely on external information sources, such as intelligent clothing, so that they can identify the proper sensor. While objects become connected objects in the network and availability of information and will increase, there is a need that search engines evolve accordingly, so that users are always presented with targeted information and are confronted with few options to select from. Along with proper notation, the finding of meaningful data can be eased by taking personal ¨ preferences and the user context into account (Jappinen, 2006). Current research in the area of the IoT focuses on connecting everyday objects and a variety of sensors to the net. Access to everyday objects opens up new possibilities of interoperable environments, and sensors provide new sources of information that can be used to enhance the behaviour of applications. For example, the intelligent clothing in the scenario above relies heavily on the information it gains from the different sensors in the environment. Sensors are already available, but they have not been ubiquitously distributed as real incentives for this are currently lacking. Supporting the ubiquitous distribution of a variety of information sources in the environment will allow for the further development of innovative applications. The ubiquity of information sources and computing devices changes the way we use the network. 4.2. Connectivity and network In the recent years, we have seen a strong acceleration in the growth of the Internet: differentiation in provided services, ever increasing data traffic, overlaid levels of networking, etc., are leading to a very complex architecture that is very difficult to manage. With the objective of accommodating the requirements coming from both fixed and mobile network services, many additional protocols have been added to the initial TCP/IP protocol suite, profoundly modifying the original architecture, and actually ignoring the principles of the original architecture. While the development of technologies in different areas can bring close to reality scenarios that seemed science fiction until a few years ago, there is a need to take a comprehensive approach to the definition of the future architecture, in order to ensure that the FI has the scalability, manageability and flexibility required to sustain the development of services unknown today.
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Even the simple scenario presented in this paper, presents a number of challenges and gives some ideas of the complexity and diversity of requirements that will be put on the network. A rough analysis leads to the identification of the following points:
John has several devices, with different characteristics, connected to each other and to the Internet.
John can seamlessly ask for services from the ‘‘Internet’’ with
simple queries and using different types of interfaces and modalities. John makes use of context based services and can rely on social networking in support of service selection. Advanced 3D search engines are used, modality of providing information to the user is based on context; conversion is operated automatically within the network. Context information is continuously collected and passed to John according to set preferences or profile. His devices may change status based on stimuli from the environment and personal preferences.
In the following the different items of this initial list of tasks are analysed to understand the main challenges they present. John has several devices, with different characteristics, connected to each other and to the Internet. These devices will have differences in their capabilities. The amount of available processing power and memory will depend on the size and cost of the device. Mobile devices have limitations due the available energy (OinasKukkonen and Kurkela, 2003). As new devices will be able to connect to the network, i.e., IoT, it is important that their characteristics are known to the network. A number of protocols describing device profiles have been developed for different applications and in different contexts, such as MIDP – Mobile Information Device Profile – for mobile devices (developed by the Java Community Process) (JSR-000118) or DPWS – Devices Profile for Web Services – (developed by OASIS) (OASIS) that defines a minimal set of implementation constraints to enable secure Web Service messaging, discovery, description, etc., on resource-constrained devices. Also UPnP – Universal Plug and Play – (developed by the UPnP Forum) (UPnP, 2008) falls in this category of protocols. The challenge of bringing the different approaches to device profiling under a single umbrella needs to be addressed. Devices should be able to easily identify themselves to the network and to communicate their profile through simple protocols, so that communication can start without excessive overhead. Light and simple communication protocols free from the burden of metadata, in particular for the simplest devices, such as sensors or actuators, should be used. This, in turn, would reduce the cost of such devices and would further help the ubiquitous distribution of a variety of sensors and other information sources. In order to fulfil the need of users, but taking the heterogeneous capabilities of different hardware into account, means that rather than relying on single communication solutions, such as TCP/IP, we need dynamic communication protocols that can adapt based on the capabilities of the devices that take part on communication. Besides hardware capabilities, the quality and type of communication links should also affect how the communication should be conducted between devices. For example, chatty protocols will be avoided when the network has a high latency. John can seamlessly ask for services from the ‘‘Internet’’ with simple queries and using different types of interfaces and modalities. Through the different devices used different modalities in the communication with the network can be activated. According to the situation (such as in motion) protocol supporting vocal interfaces may be used to provide simple queries to the network, or to activate services. In the case of information search, the
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search result may also be returned according to user preferences, taking also context specific conditions into account. Although vocal modality is preferred, detecting strong background noise or, on the contrary, a meeting where noise would be a disturbance, a textual modality may be automatically activated. The capability to continuously monitor the environment and to exchange information among the different and changing devices locally requires the capability to recognise new devices entering the network (see also above) and to reconfigure communication so that the new devices become part of it. Approaches based on the concept of SON (Self-Organising Networks) are envisaged to address this issue: an intelligent network with the ability to autonomously reconfigure itself, sustaining both network quality and providing a satisfying user experience. John makes use of context based services and can rely on social networking in support of service selection. Search functions are enhanced with context information, such as location. Location is automatically detected either by the user through GPS – GPS coordinates are then passed to the network and used as appropriate – or by the network by locating the personal user devices. In addition, social networking capabilities may be used, also in support to decision making, allowing the user to be informed about the opinion of trusted people on the subject. The importance of Social Networks is growing; Social Networking Internet services are changing the way we communicate with others, entertain and actually live (Churchill and Halverson, 2005). Social Networking is one of the primary reasons that many people have become active Internet users; people who until the emergence of social networks could not find interests in the web (Semertzidis, 2010). The Web 2.0 era has given great strength to end-users. Nowadays, users produce and consume significant quantities of multimedia content. Moreover, their behaviour, when combined with social networking (i.e., communication between users through online communities), has formed a new Internet era where multimedia content sharing through Social Networking Sites (SNSs) is an everyday practice. Advanced 3D search engines are used, modality of providing information to the user is based on context; conversion is operated automatically within the network. The capability to support exchange of 3D content and media is a very important feature for the FI (Laso-Ballesteros, 2010). Three-dimensional cinemas and TV are a reality and manipulating this type of content in the Internet will become very common. Image based search and 3D search will therefore be supported as well. Search engines need to be able to find 3D content independent of the specific view. Image recognition will have to improve to allow for 3D rotation and reconstruction of images under different viewpoints. In this respect, the currently centralised solutions for searching services and content may be slow. Local search services provided by the local network can provide accurate results about services and content within their area in a faster way than globally centralised solutions due the lesser network latency and smaller database to access the data from. Capability of generating 3D views from different 2D images will also be common practice. One of the examples in this area is that of creating a 3D rendering of a sport event starting from 2D shots provided by the spectators. Context information is continuously collected and passed to John according to set preferences or profile. John gets a lot of local information in the scenario, while walking in the street. Cars are informing him about their arrival along with possible other information, such as speed and efficiency of the brakes to stop the car. This kind of information is needed to quickly provide warnings in a timely manner, thus, the connection should rather be local and direct than globally routed. This reduces the latency of information transfer as there are less nodes that the data has to
pass. The FI should be able to dynamically decide whether local or local routing is to be used. In addition it should be considered that for the services to be reliable, the infrastructure and specifically the sensor infrastructure will have to be ubiquitous and the communication channels always on. As users will learn to rely on certain services, the absence of them may create potential danger, e.g., traffic accidents. Requirements for redundancy will have to be considered for the different services and situation and a detailed cost/benefit analysis will have to be carried out. Devices may change status based on stimuli from the environment and personal preferences. With the added communication capabilities, limited devices like intelligent clothing, data gloves, and mobile phones, can rely more on the external resources provided by network. The current trend of cloud computing where single applications and data storage is moved to the network will evolve further. One possible direction is that along with cloud applications for users, there will be network services and applications directed to other applications and devices. For example, in the scenario, 3D image construction and image analysis for the taken digital picture may not be done by the camera itself, but by a specialised service in the network that the camera uses. Such services will be especially useful for devices with limited energy source to prolong their uptime. 4.3. Social aspects Social aspects, concerning user’s behaviour and culture, have an enormous impact on the adoption of a technology: they cannot only delay its penetration, but they can even condemn it to failure. For sure, this will be also the situation for the FI. Trust is one of the key aspects to be considered, but others can be considered as well, like environment and ease of use. User’s trust impacts on two main aspects on the technological level: security and privacy. This has basically to do with the fact that the user can exchange information without being changed or captured by third parties. Of course, governmental agencies will always have the capability to interfere in this aspect, but communications and applications must be done in a way that the user feels that no one will be capable of controlling his/her life, or harm him/her in any way. The FI will consist of a huge variety of gadget applications and services, which will interact with each other, creating an increased dependency between network objects, hence, making security and privacy even more important. Applications will rely more and more on external information, e.g., data based on the user’s location or on his/her home or travel destination, the accuracy, integrity and availability of data is essential. The effects of false or erroneous data will become more severe, and risks will raise. In the example scenario, if the intelligent jacket receives falsified temperature data from a fake sensor, it can warm up rather than cool down inside the building, and thus cause negative user experience. But the problems may go beyond just the user experience. Assuming that users will rely more and more on these applications, hence, neglecting a personal judgement to take decisions, in the above example erroneous information about nearby moving cars may have serious implications and cause an accident. Still, the security of data has to be dealt without a major impact on the complexity of the system (which may decrease its efficiency, increase its cost, or diminish user experience) or on the ease of use (which may create a barrier to the deployment of applications). As applications and services may alter they behaviour based on the individual users’ needs and desires, they will require more and more information about the user. In the scenario, the warning application had to know about John’s allergy towards dogs in order to issue warning. The growing amount of transmission and
P. J¨ appinen et al. / Journal of Network and Computer Applications 36 (2013) 249–254
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Table 1 Technological challenges. Challenge
Current situation
Possible FI situation
Technical area
Reliable and capable network; novel network architectures
Often limited bandwidth in mobile scenarios
Connected everyday objects Enhancing interactivity, usability, and creating novel service front-ends
Connected objects in specific application areas; detached smart devices, e.g., clothes The main interaction means is the (mobile) user device; emergence of gesture control, but mainly application specific (gaming) or in the research area Location-based services; enhanced availability of context data mainly by means of the mobile phone; social communities and apps
Sophisticated real-time network applications; users are always connected; improved functionality (e.g., configuration and delivery speed) Communicating real world and virtual objects Multimodal interaction adapted to the user’s environment, device or skills including natural language, gestures, object interaction, etc Context data as inherent building block; multiple context sources available apart from the mobile user device; automated integration of social data, e.g., recommendations Services offered by the network and used by ‘‘dumb’’ devices; seamless outsourcing of complex computing tasks; improved usability and reduced costs Inherent building block of the network; enhanced user control; anonymised data
Network protocols, content-based networking, network virtualisation IoT, RFID, NFC
Seamless integration of context data or social network information
Network services for applications
Enhanced security models; privacy protection vs. personalisation
Increasing availability of cloud services, platforms, or infrastructures, e.g., for extensive computing tasks such as Amazon EC2 Often application-specific; use of personal information part of some business models
handling of personal data in applications and services increases the risk of a breach of privacy. However, the view on what is private information varies among individuals, and even depends on cultural aspects. Additionally, everyone has his/her own view on with whom they want to share personal data, and some kind of levels of information access has to be established. Challenge in applications and systems development will include solutions where users have control on their private data and still get customised services, where mechanisms ensure that users’ data is made available to applications but cannot be correlated in a way that privacy is breached, and where (for sure) governmental agencies will still be capable of having access to personal information for public security reasons (e.g., prevention of a terrorist attack). Another aspect of users’ trust, which has also technical implications, is that users are more and more involved in content producing, which opens up the question towards the reliability of provided content. Falsified reviews of services may be used to mislead customers selecting particular service providers and avoid others, besides the problems related to viruses and spam. Trust models that take personal relations and social group data into account are needed, in order to increase the capability of users to take advantage of content relying on recommendations. As user produced content becomes more important, the questions about protecting the rights of the content creator will also become increasingly important. Models for user created content use, and compensation from the use, may open up new business opportunities. The matter concerning the environment has a different perspective. On the one hand, the aspects related to energy efficiency are getting a lot of attention these days from the network side (it has been a key aspect for mobile terminals since the beginning) (Stuckmann and Zimmermann, 2009), and on the other, users are paying more and more attention to the social responsibility of companies, the way they do business, and so on. This means that not only energy efficiency may get an even larger attention, with companies having to show to customers that they make a proper use of this resource (which is in their own interest as well, since it enables cost reduction), but also accounting for materials waste, sharing of infrastructure, and many other ways to ‘‘look green’’.
Service front-ends, natural language processing/ gesture recognition/etc Context-awareness, wireless sensor networks, recommending systems
Cloud computing, grid computing
Security and privacy models
There are also technical implications of these aspects, and quite a lot of work is currently being done in order to address them. Finally, the ease of use is (continues to be) of paramount importance. As the number, variety, and complexity of applications increase, the problem of making all this reachable to and configurable by the user in a small number of obvious interactions is an increasing challenge. Hiding the technology behind a simple interface for interaction and visualisation of information is something that needs to be dealt with, and for which the current solutions (e.g., touch screens and accelerometers) will soon prove to be insufficient. The currently most spoken 3D Internet will be just one of the steps to be considered, but others (which still no one has thought about) will for sure make their appearance. 4.4. Summary of challenges Based on these scenarios and envisioned applications, Table 1 summarises the challenges for the FI, the current situation and the technical areas that are associated to them. Challenges are presented in a way that users will not be aware of the underlying technology, but rather on capabilities that it will enable for their everyday life.
5. Conclusions When developing the Future Internet, it is important to take the needs of envisioned future applications and their requirements into account. In this paper, we identify several problems that need to be addressed in Future Internet to enable the innovative applications envisioned in our scenario. An example scenario is presented, from which challenges on interfacing with users, connectivity and networks, and social aspects, are addressed. Invisibility of networking, adapting communication to the capabilities of heterogeneous hardware as well as security, privacy and trust, are among the main issues that need to be resolved to get applications of Future Internet feasible and accepted by users. There is also clear link from these challenges to the current research in different technological areas of Future Internet.
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Acknowledging these challenges from applications will provide justification for the conducted research. Furthermore it will direct the technological development to create the base for the feasible and innovative application rich Future Internet. Taking into account the requirements of the innovative applications that fulfill the needs of the future citizens will also help to ensure that the funding provided in national and international programs on the development of the Future Internet will not go in vain.
Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank Carsten Jacob (Fraunhofer FOKUS, Germany), Juan Cambeiro, Javier Cambeiro and Ana Vega (Telefonica, Spain) for their contributions to the eMobility Strategic Applications Agenda Future Internet scenarios, on which this paper heavily relies on. References CERP-IoT, Internet of things, strategic research roadmap, Sep. 2009 /http://ec. europa.eu/information_society/policy/rfid/documents/in_cerp.pdfS. ¨ ¨ Schonw alder J, Fouquet M, Rodosek GD, Hochstatter IC. Future Internet ¼ contentþ servicesþ management. IEEE Communications Magazine 2009;47(7): 27–33. Raychaudhuri D, Gerla M, editors. Emerging wireless technologies and the future mobile internet. New York NY, USA: Cambridge University Press; 2011.
Stuckmann P, Zimmermann R. European research on Future Internet design. IEEE Wireless Communications 2009;16(5):14–22. Papadimitratos P, de La Fortelle A, Evenssen K, Brignolo R, Cosenza S. Vehicular communication systems: enabling technologies, applications, and future outlook on intelligent transportation. IEEE Communications Magazine 2009;Vol.(No): 84–95. Ladeira D, Correia LM, and Sweet S, (editors), Strategic applications agenda, version 3, eMobility leading edge applications workgroup, Jan. 2010 /http://www.ist-emobility.org/SAA/eMobility_SAA_v3.01.pdfS. Weiser M. The computer for the 21st century. Scientific American 1991;265(3): 66–75. ¨ Jappinen P, Context-aware preferences for Internet services?, In: Proc. of CAPS’06—second workshop on context awareness for proactive systems, Kassel, Germany, June 2006. Oinas-Kukkonen,H, Kurkela,V, Developing successful mobile applications, In: Proc. of CST ’03—IASTED international conference on computer science and technology, Cancun, Mexico, May 2003. JSR-000118 Mobile information device profile 2.0 /http://jcp.org/aboutJava/com munityprocess/final/jsr118/index.htmlS. OASIS Standard–devices profile for web services, version 1.1 /http://docs.oasis-o pen.org/ws-dd/dpws/1.1/os/wsdd-dpws-1.1-spec-os.htmlS. UPnP Device architecture version 1.0 þUPnP device architecture version 1.1 (2008) þa number of device control protocols developed for different categories of devices, 2008 /http://upnp.orgS. Churchill E, Halverson C. Social networks and social networking. IEEE Internet Computing 2005;9(5):14–9. Semertzidis T, I Daras P Laso-Ballesteros (editors), ‘‘Social Networks: Current Trends and Research Challenges’’, coordinated by the next MEDIA coordination action, Nov. 2010. Laso-Ballesteros,I, Daras P, Zahariadis T et al. (editiors), Future Media Internet Research challenges and the road ahead, Future Media Internet task-force, coordinated by the next MEDIA coordination action, Apr. 2010.
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Journal of Network and Computer Applications journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jnca
An applications perspective into the Future Internet a,n ¨ Pekka Jappinen , Renata Guarneri b, Luis M. Correia c a b c
Lappeenranta University of Technology, Information technology, Skinnarilankatu 31, 53850 Lappeenranta, Finland Fondazione Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy Instituto Superior Te´cnico/Instituto de Telecomunicac- o~ es, Technical University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal
a r t i c l e i n f o
abstract
Article history: Received 7 March 2012 Received in revised form 22 June 2012 Accepted 20 August 2012 Available online 31 August 2012
The building of the Future Internet is well on its way with many research projects and experimental development activities in different parts of the works. However the debate over different approaches is still ongoing. Much of the comparison is concentrating on the different technical capabilities, however, very little effort has been put on finding out how such capabilities will actually be used by the different stakeholders and in particular by users and service providers. Decisions such as whether to take an evolutionary step with TCP/IP, start to use cellular protocols, or develop something new, should be based on realistic and validated user scenarios clearly highlighting what might be needed in the future and indicating a prioritised roadmap. As the Future Internet is needed for supporting new applications and services, it is natural that the requirements for Future Internet should come from the future applications. In this paper, we take a look at a likely future to see what kind of applications can be expected. We then analyse some potential future applications trying to understand the key features the Future Internet should support in order to meet key challenging requirements. Finally, we compare the requirements with the existing Future Internet research, in order to see how they match to each other. & 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Future Internet Applications Networking Internet of Things Security
1. Introduction Future Internet (FI) is a concept encompassing several technology areas, which is receiving a great deal of attention in the research world. As of now, there is no clear vision or agreement with regard to what such network of the future will allow, and which capabilities it will offer. It is still even under debate whether we should take either an evolutionary or a revolutionary approach on the building of the FI, although in many cases there is now a tendency to reconcile the two approaches, looking at evolution with the aim of having solutions in the short term, while a clean slate is considered for the long term approach. At the same time several national and international Future Internet research programs provide funding for the research projects that focus on development of the Future Internet and hopefully answer to the needs we have in the future. Current research related to the FI focuses on the technical capabilities, and features such as personalisation, context-awareness, Internet of Things (IoT) (CERP, 2009), cloud computing and networking, virtualisation, and content based networking. Lots of potential and new opportunities are seen in these technological advancements, and lots of effort has been put on the research in each of these areas. However, the effort put on the technology
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research is in vain unless there are applications and services that will actually use of these developed novel capabilities. While developing technology can open up new ideas for applications, visionary applications can identify new requirements for the FI to fulfil. Understanding the requirements of future applications and services may, in turn, drive research in the right technological direction, where business potential exists. In this paper, we take a look at potential future applications through a single futuristic scenario based on the visions of the leading edge applications work group of EU’s eMobility technology platform. This scenario showcases the requirements that go beyond the capabilities of the current Internet. After the scenario description, we take a closer look at the different applications therein, and look on their effect on three different categories: interaction with user, connectivity and networking, and social aspects. We show why the presented applications are not yet feasible, and describe what will be needed from the Future Internet to make such a scenario a reality. Finally, we compare their requirements to the current technological research to identify the research areas that are important from the envisioned future applications perspective and draw some conclusions.
2. Related work Applications within the FI have been previously addressed by a number of authors, not only in various papers in the open
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literature, but also in several R&D projects, namely those within the European Commission framework. ¨ ¨ The authors in Schonw alder et al. (2009) identify some services, after which they list requirements concerning network and service management. Distributed storage with guarantees is mentioned, i.e., the storage of personal data in fully distributed networks; complete life replay is foreseen, taking advantage of the fact that people will record large portions of their life using the already available microphones and cameras in many devices, and that enough storage will become available in the network; in the health sector, services related to monitoring devices and advanced sensors embedded into everyday objects are addressed, enabling medical doctors to follow patients or to provide fast help in case of emergency; finally, personalised and mixed-reality entertainment is described, in a perspective of a mixture of real-world artifacts with virtual world ones, e.g., online radio stations providing the music that best matches people activities, as well as mixed-reality interfaces will enable new ways to participate in massively multiplayer online games. In a book dedicated to future mobile Internet (Raychaudhuri and Gerla, 2011), some scenarios are established, out of which applications are identified. These scenarios encompass individual wireless devices interfacing with the Internet (mobile computing), constellations of wireless devices (ad hoc networks), and pervasive systems and sensor networks (sensor nets). The applications list streaming of live sport events, seamlessly available to the user, communications in between cars and to the infrastructure, enabling collision avoidance and traffic management, and sensor and actuator systems for real-time control of physical world objects. An overview of projects in Europe is presented in Stuckmann and Zimmermann (2009), where some ideas are addressed. Prosumers (people acting simultaneously as producers and consumers of content) are mentioned as one of the key trends, and the Internet of Things, related to applications involving real-world objects, as well as business applications based on networkassisted machine-to-machine interaction, is also addressed. Besides general overviews of applications, other authors address specific sectors as well. An example is Papadimitratos et al. (2009), in which vehicular applications are described, e.g., infrastructure-based roadside equipment warning, safe distance and speed, collision mitigation, collaborative warning, blind spot and rear detection, lane support, side crash, and lane change assistant, lust to name a few. Still, most of the literature is dedicated network architectures, and related matters, which is not the approach of the current paper.
the location of several bicycle repair companies. The results are shown in his data glasses and his headset starts giving additional information: ‘‘Abbys bicycle repair is nearest to you and is generally respected. Your friend Benny highly recommends Bike from Mike, which is only 100 m farther away. Based on the 3D image of your bicycle, both places have the capability to fix your bike. Do you want to hear Bennys story about his bike repair?’’ This information is enough for John this time, and he selects Bike from Mike, after which he gets a guiding voice through his headset. While John is finding his way to Bike from Mike, textual information is added over the objects and buildings that John sees through his data glasses. When crossing streets, he gets warnings about cars nearby. Suddenly his glasses point to a red dot on his left and at the same time his left hand data glove provides slight pressure, indicating danger to his left. There is a woman walking her dog, and John is very allergic to dogs, so he changes his walking route a bit to avoid problems. While walking, John passes by an advertisement board. The board realises there is a hockey fan within its vicinity, and informs the latest results with an in-depth analysis of the game, which can be obtained from an electronic newspaper from results’r’us. As John finally enters the store, his jacket turns off its internal warming, and starts the cooling cycle, so that John is not going to sweat while being in the store.
4. The challenges for Future Internet In order for the above describe scenario to be a reality, several technical advancements and challenges need to be addressed. Based on an analysis of the scenario, an attempt has been made at identifying the key characteristics that should feature as part of the FI. This section provides a description of the different challenges identified. A categorisation in three groups has been chosen for the description. It should be noted that the categories are not fully orthogonal, and that many of the identified challenges may be classified and addressed from different viewpoints. The first ones are the challenges related to the varying user interfaces that will be used in the FI. The second area of key challenges covers those related to connectivity and networking. Requirements in these areas will impact on the core infrastructure of the FI; it is important that such requirements be addressed in a coherent manner, to ensure that FI applications and services can be offered seamlessly and reliably across different network domains. Lastly, we point out the challenges related to security, privacy, and trust being an orthogonal layer. 4.1. Interacting with users
3. Scenario The following scenario illustrates some of the applications that may be foreseen for the FI, which have been selected so that they point out the applications perspective for what are the challenges that need to be solved. This is just a subset of the multiple ideas existing at the Strategic Applications Agenda developed within eMobility (Ladeira, 2010). John is walking in the city. His new intelligent wear is connected to the Internet and ready to provide multi-modal information to him whenever required. Today, John is looking for a bicycle repair shop. He has taken with him his camera, where he has some images of the broken bicycle; the camera connects to the Internet in order to get a 3D image of the broken bike. After that, John turns on his microphone and says: ‘‘Where is the nearest bicycle repair shop?’’ The request is turned into text format and transmitted to an Internet search engine that returns
In 1991, Mark Weiser envisioned the world of ubiquitous computing, where computers are everywhere and embedded in every object, but are hidden from the user: People no longer make use of computers but rather appliances that may or may not contain computers (Weiser, 1991). A similar fate should happen to Internet. In the FI, networking will disappear and become invisible for users; people will just use applications and services, unaware of whether they rely on networking or not. For the network connectivity, the current process for selecting a proper network technology (e.g., Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or UMTS), finding devices, hotspot/network, selecting a service provider, establishing the connection, and authenticating to network is too cumbersome. The burden of connectivity issues moves from user to the applications. After all, users are not interested in connection details, but rather want to get relevant information, useful applications and helpful services.
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The feasibility of the services John uses in the scenario, rely heavily on the invisibility of networking. Many of the automated information services would not be useful, if the user would have to remember to manually create wireless connections. These automated services using FI will be used via a variety of everyday items, like intelligent clothes or bicycles. This will put also a heavy burden on the user interface and interaction design. The services and applications of FI should have simple and intuitive interfaces that everyone is capable of using. Multi-modal interfaces require additional hardware, like microphones, and for each modality, a single source should be enough, rather than implementing them for every gadget; controlling multiple microphones on different items, allowing voice based control, can easily become cumbersome for users. As single sources will provide the modality data to several devices and applications, the communication and interoperability between a variety of gadgets is going to be important. As the amount of information sources, applications and services steadily grows, the task for finding meaningful ones without help becomes harder and harder. Indeed, it is not acceptable that users have to through pages of text to find the desired information. Hence, we need more descriptive data, i.e., metadata, about the things we have in the network to help devices to ease the selection process for users. Properly described data is also important for applications that rely on external information sources, such as intelligent clothing, so that they can identify the proper sensor. While objects become connected objects in the network and availability of information and will increase, there is a need that search engines evolve accordingly, so that users are always presented with targeted information and are confronted with few options to select from. Along with proper notation, the finding of meaningful data can be eased by taking personal ¨ preferences and the user context into account (Jappinen, 2006). Current research in the area of the IoT focuses on connecting everyday objects and a variety of sensors to the net. Access to everyday objects opens up new possibilities of interoperable environments, and sensors provide new sources of information that can be used to enhance the behaviour of applications. For example, the intelligent clothing in the scenario above relies heavily on the information it gains from the different sensors in the environment. Sensors are already available, but they have not been ubiquitously distributed as real incentives for this are currently lacking. Supporting the ubiquitous distribution of a variety of information sources in the environment will allow for the further development of innovative applications. The ubiquity of information sources and computing devices changes the way we use the network. 4.2. Connectivity and network In the recent years, we have seen a strong acceleration in the growth of the Internet: differentiation in provided services, ever increasing data traffic, overlaid levels of networking, etc., are leading to a very complex architecture that is very difficult to manage. With the objective of accommodating the requirements coming from both fixed and mobile network services, many additional protocols have been added to the initial TCP/IP protocol suite, profoundly modifying the original architecture, and actually ignoring the principles of the original architecture. While the development of technologies in different areas can bring close to reality scenarios that seemed science fiction until a few years ago, there is a need to take a comprehensive approach to the definition of the future architecture, in order to ensure that the FI has the scalability, manageability and flexibility required to sustain the development of services unknown today.
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Even the simple scenario presented in this paper, presents a number of challenges and gives some ideas of the complexity and diversity of requirements that will be put on the network. A rough analysis leads to the identification of the following points:
John has several devices, with different characteristics, connected to each other and to the Internet.
John can seamlessly ask for services from the ‘‘Internet’’ with
simple queries and using different types of interfaces and modalities. John makes use of context based services and can rely on social networking in support of service selection. Advanced 3D search engines are used, modality of providing information to the user is based on context; conversion is operated automatically within the network. Context information is continuously collected and passed to John according to set preferences or profile. His devices may change status based on stimuli from the environment and personal preferences.
In the following the different items of this initial list of tasks are analysed to understand the main challenges they present. John has several devices, with different characteristics, connected to each other and to the Internet. These devices will have differences in their capabilities. The amount of available processing power and memory will depend on the size and cost of the device. Mobile devices have limitations due the available energy (OinasKukkonen and Kurkela, 2003). As new devices will be able to connect to the network, i.e., IoT, it is important that their characteristics are known to the network. A number of protocols describing device profiles have been developed for different applications and in different contexts, such as MIDP – Mobile Information Device Profile – for mobile devices (developed by the Java Community Process) (JSR-000118) or DPWS – Devices Profile for Web Services – (developed by OASIS) (OASIS) that defines a minimal set of implementation constraints to enable secure Web Service messaging, discovery, description, etc., on resource-constrained devices. Also UPnP – Universal Plug and Play – (developed by the UPnP Forum) (UPnP, 2008) falls in this category of protocols. The challenge of bringing the different approaches to device profiling under a single umbrella needs to be addressed. Devices should be able to easily identify themselves to the network and to communicate their profile through simple protocols, so that communication can start without excessive overhead. Light and simple communication protocols free from the burden of metadata, in particular for the simplest devices, such as sensors or actuators, should be used. This, in turn, would reduce the cost of such devices and would further help the ubiquitous distribution of a variety of sensors and other information sources. In order to fulfil the need of users, but taking the heterogeneous capabilities of different hardware into account, means that rather than relying on single communication solutions, such as TCP/IP, we need dynamic communication protocols that can adapt based on the capabilities of the devices that take part on communication. Besides hardware capabilities, the quality and type of communication links should also affect how the communication should be conducted between devices. For example, chatty protocols will be avoided when the network has a high latency. John can seamlessly ask for services from the ‘‘Internet’’ with simple queries and using different types of interfaces and modalities. Through the different devices used different modalities in the communication with the network can be activated. According to the situation (such as in motion) protocol supporting vocal interfaces may be used to provide simple queries to the network, or to activate services. In the case of information search, the
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search result may also be returned according to user preferences, taking also context specific conditions into account. Although vocal modality is preferred, detecting strong background noise or, on the contrary, a meeting where noise would be a disturbance, a textual modality may be automatically activated. The capability to continuously monitor the environment and to exchange information among the different and changing devices locally requires the capability to recognise new devices entering the network (see also above) and to reconfigure communication so that the new devices become part of it. Approaches based on the concept of SON (Self-Organising Networks) are envisaged to address this issue: an intelligent network with the ability to autonomously reconfigure itself, sustaining both network quality and providing a satisfying user experience. John makes use of context based services and can rely on social networking in support of service selection. Search functions are enhanced with context information, such as location. Location is automatically detected either by the user through GPS – GPS coordinates are then passed to the network and used as appropriate – or by the network by locating the personal user devices. In addition, social networking capabilities may be used, also in support to decision making, allowing the user to be informed about the opinion of trusted people on the subject. The importance of Social Networks is growing; Social Networking Internet services are changing the way we communicate with others, entertain and actually live (Churchill and Halverson, 2005). Social Networking is one of the primary reasons that many people have become active Internet users; people who until the emergence of social networks could not find interests in the web (Semertzidis, 2010). The Web 2.0 era has given great strength to end-users. Nowadays, users produce and consume significant quantities of multimedia content. Moreover, their behaviour, when combined with social networking (i.e., communication between users through online communities), has formed a new Internet era where multimedia content sharing through Social Networking Sites (SNSs) is an everyday practice. Advanced 3D search engines are used, modality of providing information to the user is based on context; conversion is operated automatically within the network. The capability to support exchange of 3D content and media is a very important feature for the FI (Laso-Ballesteros, 2010). Three-dimensional cinemas and TV are a reality and manipulating this type of content in the Internet will become very common. Image based search and 3D search will therefore be supported as well. Search engines need to be able to find 3D content independent of the specific view. Image recognition will have to improve to allow for 3D rotation and reconstruction of images under different viewpoints. In this respect, the currently centralised solutions for searching services and content may be slow. Local search services provided by the local network can provide accurate results about services and content within their area in a faster way than globally centralised solutions due the lesser network latency and smaller database to access the data from. Capability of generating 3D views from different 2D images will also be common practice. One of the examples in this area is that of creating a 3D rendering of a sport event starting from 2D shots provided by the spectators. Context information is continuously collected and passed to John according to set preferences or profile. John gets a lot of local information in the scenario, while walking in the street. Cars are informing him about their arrival along with possible other information, such as speed and efficiency of the brakes to stop the car. This kind of information is needed to quickly provide warnings in a timely manner, thus, the connection should rather be local and direct than globally routed. This reduces the latency of information transfer as there are less nodes that the data has to
pass. The FI should be able to dynamically decide whether local or local routing is to be used. In addition it should be considered that for the services to be reliable, the infrastructure and specifically the sensor infrastructure will have to be ubiquitous and the communication channels always on. As users will learn to rely on certain services, the absence of them may create potential danger, e.g., traffic accidents. Requirements for redundancy will have to be considered for the different services and situation and a detailed cost/benefit analysis will have to be carried out. Devices may change status based on stimuli from the environment and personal preferences. With the added communication capabilities, limited devices like intelligent clothing, data gloves, and mobile phones, can rely more on the external resources provided by network. The current trend of cloud computing where single applications and data storage is moved to the network will evolve further. One possible direction is that along with cloud applications for users, there will be network services and applications directed to other applications and devices. For example, in the scenario, 3D image construction and image analysis for the taken digital picture may not be done by the camera itself, but by a specialised service in the network that the camera uses. Such services will be especially useful for devices with limited energy source to prolong their uptime. 4.3. Social aspects Social aspects, concerning user’s behaviour and culture, have an enormous impact on the adoption of a technology: they cannot only delay its penetration, but they can even condemn it to failure. For sure, this will be also the situation for the FI. Trust is one of the key aspects to be considered, but others can be considered as well, like environment and ease of use. User’s trust impacts on two main aspects on the technological level: security and privacy. This has basically to do with the fact that the user can exchange information without being changed or captured by third parties. Of course, governmental agencies will always have the capability to interfere in this aspect, but communications and applications must be done in a way that the user feels that no one will be capable of controlling his/her life, or harm him/her in any way. The FI will consist of a huge variety of gadget applications and services, which will interact with each other, creating an increased dependency between network objects, hence, making security and privacy even more important. Applications will rely more and more on external information, e.g., data based on the user’s location or on his/her home or travel destination, the accuracy, integrity and availability of data is essential. The effects of false or erroneous data will become more severe, and risks will raise. In the example scenario, if the intelligent jacket receives falsified temperature data from a fake sensor, it can warm up rather than cool down inside the building, and thus cause negative user experience. But the problems may go beyond just the user experience. Assuming that users will rely more and more on these applications, hence, neglecting a personal judgement to take decisions, in the above example erroneous information about nearby moving cars may have serious implications and cause an accident. Still, the security of data has to be dealt without a major impact on the complexity of the system (which may decrease its efficiency, increase its cost, or diminish user experience) or on the ease of use (which may create a barrier to the deployment of applications). As applications and services may alter they behaviour based on the individual users’ needs and desires, they will require more and more information about the user. In the scenario, the warning application had to know about John’s allergy towards dogs in order to issue warning. The growing amount of transmission and
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Table 1 Technological challenges. Challenge
Current situation
Possible FI situation
Technical area
Reliable and capable network; novel network architectures
Often limited bandwidth in mobile scenarios
Connected everyday objects Enhancing interactivity, usability, and creating novel service front-ends
Connected objects in specific application areas; detached smart devices, e.g., clothes The main interaction means is the (mobile) user device; emergence of gesture control, but mainly application specific (gaming) or in the research area Location-based services; enhanced availability of context data mainly by means of the mobile phone; social communities and apps
Sophisticated real-time network applications; users are always connected; improved functionality (e.g., configuration and delivery speed) Communicating real world and virtual objects Multimodal interaction adapted to the user’s environment, device or skills including natural language, gestures, object interaction, etc Context data as inherent building block; multiple context sources available apart from the mobile user device; automated integration of social data, e.g., recommendations Services offered by the network and used by ‘‘dumb’’ devices; seamless outsourcing of complex computing tasks; improved usability and reduced costs Inherent building block of the network; enhanced user control; anonymised data
Network protocols, content-based networking, network virtualisation IoT, RFID, NFC
Seamless integration of context data or social network information
Network services for applications
Enhanced security models; privacy protection vs. personalisation
Increasing availability of cloud services, platforms, or infrastructures, e.g., for extensive computing tasks such as Amazon EC2 Often application-specific; use of personal information part of some business models
handling of personal data in applications and services increases the risk of a breach of privacy. However, the view on what is private information varies among individuals, and even depends on cultural aspects. Additionally, everyone has his/her own view on with whom they want to share personal data, and some kind of levels of information access has to be established. Challenge in applications and systems development will include solutions where users have control on their private data and still get customised services, where mechanisms ensure that users’ data is made available to applications but cannot be correlated in a way that privacy is breached, and where (for sure) governmental agencies will still be capable of having access to personal information for public security reasons (e.g., prevention of a terrorist attack). Another aspect of users’ trust, which has also technical implications, is that users are more and more involved in content producing, which opens up the question towards the reliability of provided content. Falsified reviews of services may be used to mislead customers selecting particular service providers and avoid others, besides the problems related to viruses and spam. Trust models that take personal relations and social group data into account are needed, in order to increase the capability of users to take advantage of content relying on recommendations. As user produced content becomes more important, the questions about protecting the rights of the content creator will also become increasingly important. Models for user created content use, and compensation from the use, may open up new business opportunities. The matter concerning the environment has a different perspective. On the one hand, the aspects related to energy efficiency are getting a lot of attention these days from the network side (it has been a key aspect for mobile terminals since the beginning) (Stuckmann and Zimmermann, 2009), and on the other, users are paying more and more attention to the social responsibility of companies, the way they do business, and so on. This means that not only energy efficiency may get an even larger attention, with companies having to show to customers that they make a proper use of this resource (which is in their own interest as well, since it enables cost reduction), but also accounting for materials waste, sharing of infrastructure, and many other ways to ‘‘look green’’.
Service front-ends, natural language processing/ gesture recognition/etc Context-awareness, wireless sensor networks, recommending systems
Cloud computing, grid computing
Security and privacy models
There are also technical implications of these aspects, and quite a lot of work is currently being done in order to address them. Finally, the ease of use is (continues to be) of paramount importance. As the number, variety, and complexity of applications increase, the problem of making all this reachable to and configurable by the user in a small number of obvious interactions is an increasing challenge. Hiding the technology behind a simple interface for interaction and visualisation of information is something that needs to be dealt with, and for which the current solutions (e.g., touch screens and accelerometers) will soon prove to be insufficient. The currently most spoken 3D Internet will be just one of the steps to be considered, but others (which still no one has thought about) will for sure make their appearance. 4.4. Summary of challenges Based on these scenarios and envisioned applications, Table 1 summarises the challenges for the FI, the current situation and the technical areas that are associated to them. Challenges are presented in a way that users will not be aware of the underlying technology, but rather on capabilities that it will enable for their everyday life.
5. Conclusions When developing the Future Internet, it is important to take the needs of envisioned future applications and their requirements into account. In this paper, we identify several problems that need to be addressed in Future Internet to enable the innovative applications envisioned in our scenario. An example scenario is presented, from which challenges on interfacing with users, connectivity and networks, and social aspects, are addressed. Invisibility of networking, adapting communication to the capabilities of heterogeneous hardware as well as security, privacy and trust, are among the main issues that need to be resolved to get applications of Future Internet feasible and accepted by users. There is also clear link from these challenges to the current research in different technological areas of Future Internet.
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Acknowledging these challenges from applications will provide justification for the conducted research. Furthermore it will direct the technological development to create the base for the feasible and innovative application rich Future Internet. Taking into account the requirements of the innovative applications that fulfill the needs of the future citizens will also help to ensure that the funding provided in national and international programs on the development of the Future Internet will not go in vain.
Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank Carsten Jacob (Fraunhofer FOKUS, Germany), Juan Cambeiro, Javier Cambeiro and Ana Vega (Telefonica, Spain) for their contributions to the eMobility Strategic Applications Agenda Future Internet scenarios, on which this paper heavily relies on. References CERP-IoT, Internet of things, strategic research roadmap, Sep. 2009 /http://ec. europa.eu/information_society/policy/rfid/documents/in_cerp.pdfS. ¨ ¨ Schonw alder J, Fouquet M, Rodosek GD, Hochstatter IC. Future Internet ¼ contentþ servicesþ management. IEEE Communications Magazine 2009;47(7): 27–33. Raychaudhuri D, Gerla M, editors. Emerging wireless technologies and the future mobile internet. New York NY, USA: Cambridge University Press; 2011.
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