The Big Picture

The diffusion of mobile personal devices, as well as the pervasiveness of wireless communication technologies, is pushing a tighter and tighter convergence between the cyber world (of Internet, Internet services and Apps), and the physical world. Data flows almost continuously between the two layers, and this is the key ingredient for the mutual interaction and impact between these two worlds. For example, social relationships in the physical world translate in friendship links and data flows over Online Social Networks in the cyber world, but also OSN services impact on people’s actions in the physical world (e.g., rallies and mass events organised exclusively through OSN, job offer and recruitment via LinkedIn). One of the most intriguing effects of this convergence is that the human user becomes the centre of most cyber world services, and this can have a tremendous impact on the way we design not only applications, but more in general Internet services and even networking technologies. People are not mere users of network technologies and services designed exclusively with engineering optimisation parameters in mind, but their behaviour can become one of the key elements for designing the network technologies and services. This paradigm change has recently been termed an “Anti-Copernican” revolution that puts back the human at the centre of the “Internet universe”. It is a shift from a vision where users adapt to a network technology designed with typical engineering KPI in mind, to and “Internet of People” paradigm, where the user is the centre not only of application, but also of the network design. If one also considers self-organising networks, where users’ personal devices are themselves the key nodes of the network (e.g. in opportunistic networks), human-centricity at all layers of the network stack becomes even more evident.

We stress the fact that the proposed human-centric approach to the design of future Internet-based communication systems is not yet another bio-inspired networking design wave. Because of the fact that users devices act as proxies of their users, embedding efficient models of human behaviour in the core design of communication systems is a natural way to make devices behave as their human users would do if faced with the same choices and decisions. Moreover, this approach is not confined to designing human-centred applications. The inter-disciplinary approach impacts all conventional layers of the communication stack above the enabling communication technologies, and brings advantage at all layers, as shown by the mentioned examples.

The work needed

In this view, the design of network technologies, services and applications benefits a lot from an inter-disciplinary approach, where economical, social and human sciences and ICT come together. While examples of inter-disciplinary design of network solutions are present in the literature, a reference research area focused on approaches for systematic design patterns and methodologies is still missing. The proposed FET proactive topic would aim at filling this gap. Specifically, the aim is to catalyse efforts on inter-disciplinary network design, which are today dispersed across various communities, and create a reference research area on this. It would be needed to engage in the beginning, beyond ICT researchers, at least the communities of social sciences, cognitive psychology and micro-economics. The rationale is that these communities have produced very interesting mathematical models of several aspects of the human behaviour (like, e.g., social network structures, mental cognitive processes, resource trading, to mention just a few examples) that may serve as basis for an inter-disciplinary design of network solutions. In addition, also the community of complex network analysis should be engaged. In this area, researchers have recently produced very useful models to describe human social structures with compact graph representations, from which it is possible to derive significant human behavioural information. In general, the availability of quantitative mathematical (rather than qualitative descriptive) models is fundamental, as it constitutes an appropriate common “language” that will strongly support the discussion among such diverse communities. This has proved to be a cornerstone of fruitful collaborations between these communities in the recent past. Therefore, (qualitative) research, i.e., not grounded on sound mathematical or algorithmic models, on how humanities and social sciences impact on Future Internet designs, need to be considered out of scope of such a FET proactive topic.

The opportunity

The diffusion of personal (mobile) devices and pervasive communication technologies is expected to exponentially increase in the next few years (for example, CISCO foresees a tenfold increase of mobile data traffic between 2015 and 2020, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 57% [1]). This is pushing more and more the Cyber-Physical Convergence vision, discussed, among others, in [3]. According to this vision, the physical world of the users and the cyber world of Internet applications and services are more and more integrated and converging. Data generated in the physical world (e.g., by sensors embedded in personal users’ devices and physical infrastructures) flows to the cyber world, where it is elaborated and exchanged. On the other hand, interactions in the cyber world result in actions in the physical world (e.g., because users modify their behaviour based on information received through Internet applications, or because physical infrastructures are configured through actuators).

One of the key effects of this convergence is that humans are more and more at the centre of the technical systems they use. Humans and the cyber systems through which they communicate become actors of a complex socio-technical ecosystem, and designing effective communication systems needs to take into consideration human behaviours as a structural paradigm, rather than as an afterthought. In [7], this paradigm change is named the “Anti-Copernican Revolution”, as it puts (back) the human at the centre of the stage in the design and evaluation of Internet communication systems.

According to this communication ecosystem view, we see future research on Internet-based communication systems as a truly inter-disciplinary field, shaped by at least four main interacting dimensions and linking the technological perspective closely to social, economic and cognitive sciences (describing the behaviour of humans) for designing the communication and data exchange mechanisms of future communication systems. Here, ICT technologies provide the basic enabling solutions for communication to occur. However, the algorithms and protocols for communication and data exchange are not driven exclusively by the need to optimise network resource usage (as in the design of legacy Internet systems). In the converged cyber-physical environment, user devices become proxies of their users in the cyber world: They communicate, exchange and manage data by “emulating” the way their human users would do if interacting with each other in the physical world. Social sciences model the way users establish social relationships, how they trust each other, and how they are prepared to share resources with each other. Communication systems exploiting these models (“social-aware networking protocols”) have proved to be very efficient in supporting communication in human-centred mobile networks [4][5]. Cognitive psychology describes, among others, how human beings perceive and interact with data, how they assess relevance of information, how they exchange it when interacting, and how they extract knowledge out of it. Data-centric communication systems for mobile networks have already been proposed, where these models are exploited to efficiently guide information diffusion among users [2]. Micro-economics, last not least, is modelling how humans negotiate the use of infrastructure and content resources, trade and share them. This is also fundamental knowledge to predict how they can interact with each other through communication systems, and to embed such knowledge in the systems’ design. Finally, very useful models have been derived in the area of complex network analysis, describing, for example, human social relationships with compact graph descriptions, amenable to characterise human behavioural properties and exploit them in the design of networking solutions.

Therefore, we are now at a cornestone when ICT technologies are ready to support such a long-term paradigm shift in the design of Future Intenret centred around the users, while social, cognitive, complex-network and micro-economic sciences provide the right modelling tools to base such revolutionary design patterns on very well-established and solid grounds, avoid the pitfalls of conventional bio-inspired approaches.

References

1. Cisco, “Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update 2015–2020,” Cisco, Tech. Rep., http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-provider/visual-networking-index-vni/mobile-white-paper-c11-520862.html, 2016.
2. M. Conti, M. Mordacchini, and A. Passarella, “Design and performance evaluation of data dissemination systems for opportunistic networks based on cognitive heuristics,” ACM Trans. Auton. Adapt. Syst., vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 12:1–12:32, 2013.
3. M. Conti, S. K. Das, C. Bisdikian, M. Kumar, L. M. Ni, A. Passarella, G. Roussos, G. Troster, G. Tsudik, and F. Zambonelli, “Looking ahead in pervasive computing: Challenges and opportunities in the era of cyber–physical convergence,” Pervasive and Mobile Computing, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 2–21, 2012
4. E. Daly and M. Haahr, “Social network analysis for information flow in disconnected Delay-Tolerant MANETs,” IEEE Trans. Mobile Comput., vol. 8, no. 5, pp. 606–621, May. 2009.
5. P. Hui, J. Crowcroft, and E. Yoneki, “Bubble rap: Social-based forwarding in delay tolerant networks,” IEEE Trans. Mobile Comput., vol. 10, no. 11, pp. 1576–1589, Nov. 2011.
6. P. Reichl, “Quality of Experience in Convergent Communication Ecosystems”, 2013.
7. P. Reichl: From QoS to QoE: Buzzword Issue or Anti-Copernican Revolution? Keynote abstract, Proc. EuroNF Workshop on Traffic Management and Traffic Engineering for the Future Internet, p. 23, Dec. 2009.
8. P. Reichl, A. Passarella: Back to the Future: Towards an Internet of People (IoP). Invited Paper, Proc. MMBNet 2015, Hamburg, Germany, September 2015.