Opportunistic networks for efficient application provisioning in the Future Internet: Business scenarios and technical challenges

Opportunistic Networks are temporary, localized, operator-governed network segments that are created under certain circumstances. Opportunistic Networks can be used as coordinated extensions of the infrastructure in order to provide solution to matters such as coverage and capacity extension, infrastructure supported opportunistic ad-hoc networking, traffic aggregation in the access and backhaul network. Stakeholders such as network operators, end-users and content/ service providers can be benefited from the new network paradigm which will lead to increased revenue for the operator, better QoS for the end-users and new opportunities for the content/ service providers. A high-level functional architecture is also described as part of the proposed solution.