Evaluation of the Cost Advantage of Application and Context Aware Networking

Abstract

Application and context aware infrastructures involve directly the network in the execution of application-layer tasks through special devices, referred to as cards, placed in network nodes. The sharp separation of distributed applications and network is smoothed and, by performing part of the application or middleware inside the network, it is possible to obtain economic benefits mainly provided by a better optimization of the whole ICT infrastructure. This higher optimization is allowed by the additional degree of freedom of placing cards in network nodes and of assigning application-layer processing to such cards. In this paper, we summarize an optimization algorithm capable of minimizing the total cost of the entire ICT infrastructure, given a target performance objective defined as the average end-to-end delay for the completion of the distributed application tasks, and we focus on two sample applications: caching and protocol translation. The joint optimization of computing and communication requirements is one of the most innovative contributions of this paper, as in the literature hardware and network components are optimized separately.