Open connectivity services for the future internet

In this paper we present an Open Connectivity Services architecture, which has been conceived such as to cope with the challenges posed by the Future Internet. By relying on currently working solutions and establishing a trustworthy migration strategy, the proposed architecture provides a flexible framework that supports both legacy and enhanced connectivity mechanisms. It is able to dynamically adapt the operation of the involved mechanisms according to the particular requirements of the services and applications. This open architecture is based on three main modules (information gathering, decision taking and decision enforcement) which mimic the basic functionalities of any connectivity mechanism. By having a common way of representing current and future mechanisms, the OConS operation eases the instantiation, launch and interconnection of mechanisms by the specified orchestration procedures. A challenging flash crowd scenario is presented for validation of the architecture, where enhanced connectivity mechanisms support both cloud networking and network of information use cases.