The Internet - barely grown up and already there’s talk of redesigning it. What will be the way to Future Internet in a possibly Post-IP era, to an Internet that can cope with all the services users require? Will it be evolution or revolution? This talk will start off by highlighting current and emerging future requirements and services and examines suitability of current internet architecture and its associated protocols. It explains what evolutionary research approach to future internet is and compares that with revolutionary approaches. It will give an overview of international initiatives mainly USA, Europe and Japan in this important area. The talk ends with a list of strategically important research issues which are essential in shaping up future internet architecture, service delivery and protocols.

Countries with advanced economies are service-oriented economies. In these countries, three-fourths of the economic output comes from services. Services not only dominate the output of developed nations, but also absorb much of the inputs of production, such as labour and capital.
Service Science, Management, and Engineering (SSME) is a term introduced by IBM to describe the science of services, a new interdisciplinary approach to the study, design, and implementation of services systems. The purpose of this new discipline is to bring analytical rigor to key issues as service creation and delivery. This new discipline is still at its infancy and it is expected that its development will accelerate in the next five years.
In this talk, we will give an overview of this new discipline from the IT and networking services point of view. First, we will give a definition of services and describe its main characteristics. Then, we will briefly discuss what is Service Science, and give two examples from SoA and NGN. Subsequently, we will present a framework for service creation that can be used to develop new services but also it can be used as a guidance to developing an SSME academic program.

The information revolution of the last decade has resulted in a phenomenal increase in the quantity of content (including multimedia content) available to an increasing number of different users with different preferences who access it through a plethora of devices and over heterogeneous networks. End devices range from mobile phones to high definition TVs, access networks can be as diverse as GSM and broadband networks, and the various backbone networks are different in bandwidth and Quality of Service (QoS) support. In addition, users have different content/presentation preferences and intend to consume the content at different locations, times, and under altering circumstances.
In order to become the vision as indicated above reality substantial research and standardization efforts have been undertaken which are collectively referred to as Universal Multimedia Access (UMA). An important and comprehensive standard in this field is the MPEG-21 Multimedia Framework, formally referred to as ISO/IEC 21000. The aim of MPEG-21 is to enable transparent and augmented use of multimedia resources across a wide range of networks, devices, user preferences, and communities, notably for trading (of bits). In particular, it shall enable the transaction of Digital Items among Users. A Digital Item is defines as a structured digital object with a standard representation and metadata and is the fundamental unit of transaction and distribution within the MPEG-21 multimedia framework. A User (please note the upper case “U”) is defined as any entity that interacts within this framework or makes use of Digital Items. The MPEG-21 standard currently comprises 17 parts which can be clustered into six major categories each dealing with different aspect of the Digital Items: declaration (and identification), digital rights management, adaptation, processing, systems, and miscellaneous aspects (i.e., reference software, conformance, etc.). The talk will present and review these concepts with the emphasize on providing universal access to multimedia contents independent of the User's location, time, and other usage environment conditions.
Several projects funded by the European Commission (EC) – among them are DANAE and ENTHRONE worth to mention – have implemented and integrated (parts of) the MPEG-21 standard in order to demonstrate its feasibility. The aim of the DANAE Specific Targeted Research Project (STREP) was to develop scalable coding formats and an MPEG-21-based end-to-end architecture comprising a server, client, and adaptation node (all MPEG-21-enabled) which allows for dynamic and distributed adaptation of scalable media formats. On the other hand, the objectives of the ENTHRONE Integrated Project (IP) are to provide an integrated management solution enabling QoS within heterogeneous environments based on MPEG-21 and to demonstrate the ENTHRONE solution in a large-scale pilot. Therefore, the talk will review ENTHRONE's contribution to the UMA issue and will demonstrate how the MPEG-21 concepts are adopted on a broader scale.