Meeting Objectives: AIMS is an IFIP sponsored conference, organized as a single-track event integrating regular conference paper sessions, tutorials, keynotes, and a PhD student workshop into a highly interactive event. One of the goals of AIMS is to look beyond borders and to stimulate the exchange of ideas across different communities and among PhD students combined with hands-on experiences in network and service management topics, which requires all attendees to work in practical on-site courses combined with preceding short tutorial-like teaching sessions.

The hands-on sessions preceding the conference were in particular targeted at Ph.D. students and introduced capable tools and test bed architectures, motivating Ph.D.s to conduct their experiments with the help of these. Furthermore, Ph.D. students were supported further in their work, by two Ph.D. sessions during the main conference, allowing them to present their initial research ideas and receiving input of a diverse expert community.

Meeting Outcome: The conference revealed that content-centric networking (including amongst others CDNs) is still incomplete with respect to management, operations, and troubleshooting functionality, especially in terms of security support. The change of services delivered within a given, commercial network happens continuously, but not over night. Due to the focus it became obvious that a lot of communication systems research is focused on the role of the Internet as a multi media distribution technology. Presentations revealed that maintaining or even improving current QoS standards despite the exploding traffic demands caused by interactive and video applications has to be tackled by dedicated approaches. Also ever growing cyber security threats received much attention throughout the conference.

Meeting Impact on SmartenIT: SmartenIT will benefit from the interactions with network and service management experts, especially in the areas of scalability, mechanisms design, and game theoretic evaluations. The lack of practical management solutions in CDNs and overlay networks proves that SmartenIT’s work addressed is highly relevant. In addition, the view on business models of network providers and application providers and their next steps varies a lot with respect to fixed network video delivery or wireless video streaming. Approaches that use evolutionary algorithms to solve automatic routing management problems were presented in the sessions and are relevant for SmartenIT. Also presented approaches to localize and offload content of social applications have relevance for SmartenIT, just as an approach for anticipatory content distribution. Mobility-supporting incentive schemes for content distribution and energy efficiency also constituted valuable input to attending SmartenIT members.