Application scenarios for cognitive transport service in next-generation networks

This article describes the impact of a cognitive transport and resource management paradigm on the convergence of application and network services in next-generation networks. This is achieved by a new transport service layer implementing the functions needed by applications to automatically negotiate the network transport services. A testbed built on widely available technologies is described, presenting and discussing experiments that demonstrate the feasibility and advantages of a network infrastructure equipped with the proposed transport service layer. Two case studies are considered here with reference to the scenario of a user wishing to access a video service. The former is a traditional videoon- demand service, based on dynamic bandwidth allocation; the latter considers a "cloud-based" video-on-demand service, in which the video content is dynamically moved where user location and resource availability require.