CONGN

The rapid developments in the Internet and emerging alternative network protocol stacks promise unprecedented levels of sharing of information, computing and communication resources through distributed collaborations of diverse network elements. Collaborative networking comprises complex systems with many tunable interdependent components, parameters and network performance objectives.

To realize their potential, collaborative networks need to provide effective and efficient support for ubiquitous integration of heterogeneous technologies such as mobile devices and infrastructures, web services, grid computing systems, various operating environments, and diverse COTS products. In addition, research is needed to provide network cognition, which entails learning and reasoning by the diverse network elements to dynamically select the ideal network operating state and adapt to varying network and group contexts in order to optimize end-to-end performance of the network as a whole. Moreover, networking aspects such as autonomicity, security, trust, management, quality-of-service support and localization need to be cognizant of group dynamics.

Apparently, numerous challenges face the realization of collaborative networking. These challenges include balancing the competing goals of collaboration, autonomy and security; allowing mobile users and groups to seamlessly communicate throughout multiple heterogeneous networks and enjoy multiparty multimedia applications while on the move between different administrative domains; developing new APIs to enable applications to detect available access networks and learn their characteristics, thus becoming aware of location, context, and quality-of-service; and carefully optimizing network parameters across the entire protocol stack.