A network cost provision framework for Network-Aware applications

While the explicit provision of Network Awareness to applications towards QoE optimisation has attracted significant attention during the past decade, very few solutions have been proposed which can be considered both feasible and scalable. Towards this direction, this paper proposes a framework which implements a Network Cost Service, explicitly providing the “network cost” between two or more network nodes as well as the a priori QoE estimation for a specific application - with the aim of assisting QoE-based optimization of current and emerging communication paradigms, such as peer-to-peer communication, distributed caching, information-centric networking and in-network cloud services. The proposed framework has been fully implemented, assessed and released as open-source for further experimentation. Large-scale deployment considerations and open research issues are also discussed.