D2.1 Technical Requirements released for public review

This D2.1 is one of the 1st public deliverables of 4WARD [pdf] and it describes the technical requirements for a family of future global communication networks (referred to as “4WARD Framework” throughout the document), with the potential to supersede current telecommunication networks as well as the current “internet” in the long run, as identified in the first phase of the FP7 project “4WARD”.
First, the document describes briefly the mission and objectives of the project and the future network technology research areas in the work packages; as well as the followed methodology to collect the views from the different work packages. Then the aspects and the guidelines from the main non-technical perspectives (usage and services; socio-economics; regulation, governance and policy) are discussed. Based on those considerations, the overall technical requirements are derived and related to the views of the different technology areas as well as of the vertical technical themes (mobility, security, quality of service, inter-provider issues, and physical layer awareness). The detailed requirements are listed in the annex of the document.
The overall technical requirements for the 4WARD Framework listed in this document shall serve as a mandatory benchmark for the research directions and results expected by the project 4WARD, i.e. for the further design of specific 4WARD Networks, and may give useful guidelines for any activities towards a “Future Internet”.
The non-technical concerns are focusing on the expected demand created by new innovative services and applications, not only for a growing world population but also in a world of “connected things”. Special considerations have been given to the aspects of sustainability, awareness of environmental aspects, usability for everybody, and overcoming the shortages of the current internet concerning security, privacy vs. governance and control.
The technical requirements derived thereof are grouped around the following topics:
• services and application support for an information-centric network, covering also quality of services issues and usability
• mobility and wireless awareness,
• availability, scalability and extensibility
• interoperability, self-management, virtualisation
• security and privacy.
With this set of requirements as a starting point, further iterations during the design of specific 4WARD Networks will have to deal with an appropriate selection of these requirements still guaranteeing interoperability of dependent 4WARD Networks under the overall mission.