The pervasiveness of information and communication technologies is driving a social evolution, whose tangible effect is observable in human mobility behavior and digital usages. Originally, the Internet was conceived to serving fix and sedentary usages, while current trends clearly show that future Internet users will be increasingly mobile and nomadic. As of Institut Mediametrie [39], in September 2012, 56% of French mobile phone users were smartphone users, and almost 50% mobile phone users effectively connected to the Internet with their phone. This trend is accelerating with already 38% of smartphone users accessing the TV on their phone, and 32% of users have subscribed a plan with “unlimited options” providing a wide access to content and digital services. The extremely rapid pace at which this evolution is taking place practically manifests with poor service availability, and represents a major impediment for advanced services. The exponential growth of mobile Internet usages calls for a novel Cloud computing and resource-provisioning solution to offload the access networks, which need to be geographically distributed and temporally adaptive. Recent studies, showing that mobile user movement patterns can be accurately predicted by analyzing samples of their displacements, suggest that forecasting network customer mobility and usages can play a major role to that end. However, the data consumption dynamics and their correlation with macroscopic user mobility behaviors are largely unknown today. The reason is the still insufficient coordination between traffic engineering, usage profiling and user mobility detection, and the lack of public exploitable access data traces. In this project, we aim at filling this void, from both a fundamental and technological standpoint, creating an interdisciplinary expertise of academic laboratories on Cloud networking (LIP6, UPMC), wireless access and mobile networking (Urbanet, INRIA) and socio-economic impact of telecommunications (SES, Télécom ParisTech), as well as of industry R&D on socioeconomic analysis of mobile networks (SENSE, Orange Labs) and on large-scale WiFi network management (Ucopia Communications). Thanks to Orange and Ucopia providing cellular and WiFi access data logs, our purpose is to define adequate solutions to capture mobility patterns, correlating mobility with usages for a mobile Cloud offloading architecture for telecom networks. This solution requires a reliable estimation of mobility and usages metrics for adaptive Cloud distribution and resource allocation. Indeed, the network efficiency might be very positively affected if selected Cloud servers could be proactively distributed close to identifiable rendezvous points regularly approached by masses of users, or along geolocated consumption flows adaptively determined. This solution aims to master “flash-mobs effects” while increasing network efficiency. The usages we care about are mobile Internet services such as streaming, digital maps, social networks, and software updates. Mobile access networks commonly suffer upon smarthphone software releases and during special events aggregating large masses of persons sharing similar interests (e.g., sport events), hence concurrently accessing similar services. Such events shall be detected in real-time so as to dynamically allocate network resources and move virtual machines close to access gateways. Cloud services can largely profit from such a distributed access: by hosting resources out of the user terminal, they enable remote processing and storage of personal data. Mobile equipment has notably limited computing and energy resources, and the presence of a close-enough Cloud virtual machines and their adaptive migration along users’ displacements can allow computing offloading, grant important battery energy savings, while guaranteeing connection resiliency.

The ever-increasing growth of the Internet, accelerated by the massive deployment of mobile data services and other bandwidth-greedy services like IPTV, the deployment of new services based on the cloud computing paradigm, and the ubiquitous use of multi-homing and enhanced traffic engineering, has lately raised issues leading to an increasing concern on the scalability of today’s Internet architecture. These issues are mostly due to the use of a single numbering space, namely the IP addressing space, for both host transport sessions identification and network routing. Based on the separation of the end-systems’ addressing space (the identifiers) and the routing locators’ space, the Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) started as a research effort in the Routing Research Group but made its way to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), becoming a very attractive technology for Future Internet Architecture. LISP can indeed be used to accommodate the perceived Internet growth, while facilitating the deployment of new services. In such a context, the design and operation of LISP networks naturally encourages the need for a large scale flexible platform that would not only facilitate the development of disruptive research in the area of advanced IP forwarding paradigms, but would also ease the prototyping of new LISP-based services. These are key points in order to grasp the full implications of such architecture, assess its benefits and performance under various conditions, as well as obtaining the know-how necessary to take full advantage, add new features, and develop new products. The existing LISP beta network [16], which played a key role in designing and testing LISP’s basic features, has, however, strong limitations due to its central and monolithic control by one single commercial actor. As such, it does not represent the optimal environment neither to explore innovative services, nor to develop new enhanced features. No use to mention, that disruptive research and evaluation of multi-party scenarios is not possible. The LISP-Lab project aims at filling this gap, building an open platform, based on the LISP architecture, providing the environment to perform high quality research and support the design, development, and thorough assessment of new services and use-cases. The LISP-Lab Project is not meant to create a competitor of the LISP beta network [16], rather, through collaboration, to complement it by technical contributions in such a way as to overcome existing limitations. The range of technical tasks planned in the LISP-Lab project, from cloud networking, to access technology, through inter-domain connectivity, traffic engineering, and mapping management, has a larger scope than the LISP beta network, boosting innovation beyond the LISP technology itself. The LISP-Lab platform will be multi-party in its very nature, being the collaborative result of a first class consortium composed of academic institutions (Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Télécom ParisTech), public interest groups (RENATER, Rezopole) and industrial partners (Border6, AlphaLink, NonStopSystems, France Telecom Orange, Ucopia). The LISP-Lab project aims at becoming a main actor in driving future evolution of the LISP standardization, with strong impact on the networking industry and the Internet ecosystem at large. It will provide industrial leadership through scientific dissemination and contributions in the most important ICT forums like for instance the French Operators Network Group. The LISP-Lab project focuses as well on open source software, developed in order to provide both academy and industry with the tools to perform high quality research and develop new products. Interested external parties will be invited to join the LISP-Lab platform in the aim of creating a long lasting effort going beyond this specific project call and beyond national borders, creating the seeds for a bigger and even more advanced international collaboration.