This was the twenty-sixth in a series of Conferences, with Conference Co-chairs: Åke Arvidsson, Ericsson AB, Sweden and Ulf Körner, Lund Institute of Technology, Sweden, which took place on September 9-11, 2014, in Blekinge Institute of Technology in
Karlskrona, Sweden.

In ITC26, George Darzanos, PhD candidate in Computer Science at Athens University of Economics and Business, presented his joint work with I. Papafili and G. D. Stamoulis, on a socially-aware traffic management mechanism for efficient delivery of content in online social networks, which was developed within SmartenIT.

Below, the abstract of the presentation and article published in the proceeding of the ITC26 conference is presented:

The ongoing growth of the Internet traffic is largely due to video delivery platforms as well as to online social networks (OSNs), where both popular and long-tail content, such as user-generated content (UGC), is shared. UGC is not dealt with effectively by the traditional approaches of Web caches and CDNs, as it has different demand patterns: it is more likely to be exchanged within a local geographic region and has a more even popularity distribution with fewer popular objects. In this work, we propose an ISP-friendly mechanism for enhancing content delivery exploiting social information extracted from OSNs, e.g. social relationships, common interests and locality of content exchange, as a new 'source' of meta-information to characterize and predict the end-user’s behavior. The basic components of our mechanism called SEConD are: (i) a socially-aware proxy server inserted in a local geographic region (e.g. an AS) to orchestrate content distribution, (ii) socially-aware messaging overlays employed to trigger video prefetching, (iii) content-based P2P overlays employed to perform video streaming in each region, and (iv) a two-level caching strategy both in the socially-aware proxy server and in the OSN user’s device (UD) whenever online. We also develop an evaluation framework to simulate the generation of content in the environment of an OSN, in order to evaluate our mechanism and compare it with other approaches in the literature. The evaluation results show that our mechanism improves users’ Quality of Experience (QoE) and simultaneously, reduces traffic in potentially expensive inter-domain links, as well as the origin content server contribution.

Another paper Performance Model for Waiting Times in Cloud File Synchronization Services by Christian Schwartz, Matthias Hirth, Tobias Hoßfeld, Phuoc Tran-Gia of University of Würzburg was accepted and presented at ITC26. Below the abstract of the paper is presented:

Over the last few years, the importance of cloud services for file synchronization has been increasing. With the release of network enabled cameras like Google Glass the trend of synchronizing new photos with the cloud has emerged as an important new use case for mobile networks. Multiple stakeholder are interested in optimizing this synchronization process according to different orthogonal metrics. The end user is interested in a fast synchronization of images as well as a low energy consumption of the client used for upload to the network. The network operator requires a low number of network connections per synchronization of a batch of images in order to reduce the signalling load of the mobile network. This paper answers the question if the goals of the stakeholders can be achieved by selecting an appropriate synchronization scheduling mechanism. Therefore, we first present a model for the waiting time of cloud file synchronization services. Second, we perform measurements on the popular Dropbox service to obtain
parameters required in the model. Finally, we perform a parameter study over the considered mechanisms and parameters, suggest a preferable algorithm and identify trade-offs favorable for all stakeholders.