A road to media-aware user-dependent self-adaptive Networks

The Telecommunications world has been using the wholesale model for a long time, covering both the Connectivity and Service provisioning. This business model is 100% proof for analog telephony and even for Internet Access, but it's starting to show its weakness when Broadcast services offers are brought to the market. Creativity and innovation are key factors for the success of new business roles, more precisely disruptive creativity (one of the pillars of Schumpeter's philosophy: research on topics that big companies will not invest as they are not part of their day-to-day products, services or process). However, the obsession for absolute control by Telecommunications operators is stopping the disruptive creativity in new multimedia services provisioning (either by Service Providers or by users acting as producers). But, there are a lot of signs that show that it is about time to move from the ldquoBuy bandwidthrdquo to the ldquoBuy personalized servicesrdquo. This paper addresses the new bunch of advanced technologies provided by media-aware, user-dependent, self-adaptive Networks (a.k.a. R2D2Networks) in order to exploit the cost-effectiveness of European Infrastructures already deployed, whilst applying research into the User-centric based multimedia services environment, with specific attention to the efficient management of connectivity resources among the home, in-building and access networks. R2D2Networks will provide a network management system that doesn't rely on any specific content provider models, or require major changes in the network architectures. This means that time to market can be short, and that also smaller operators can benefit from this solution.