Opportunistic Networks and Cognitive Management Systems for Efficient Application Provisioning in the Future Internet: An Overview

In the Future Internet era, it will be required to provide coordinated extensions of the infrastructure as a potential solution to matters such as coverage and capacity extension, infrastructure supported opportunistic ad-hoc networking and traffic aggregation in the access and backhaul network. Opportunistic networks are a solution to that direction. Opportunistic Networks are temporary, localized, operator-governed network segments that are created under certain circumstances. To that respect, opportunistic networks are dynamically created, managed and terminated. Mechanisms for the efficient, dynamic creation, management and termination of opportunistic networks are needed. These can be implemented through cognitive management functionality. Furthermore, various stakeholders such as network operators, end-users and content/ service providers can be benefited from the new network paradigm which will lead to increased revenue for the operator, better QoS for the end-users and new opportunities for the content/ service providers. Consequently, this work is based on the OneFIT project’s solution which comprises opportunistic networks and cognitive management systems for the efficient application provisioning in the Future Internet.