An Overview of Application Traffic Management Approaches: Challenges and Potential Extensions

The Internet has seen a strong move to support overlay applications and services, which demand a coherent and integrated control in underlying heterogeneous networks in a scalable, resilient, and energy-efficient manner. To do so, a tighter integration of network management and overlay service functionality can lead to cross-layer optimization of operations and management, which is a promising approach and may offer a large business potential in operational perspectives for all players involved. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to present and discuss the impact of new paradigms such as cloud computing and software-defined networking which will play central role in the Future Internet, discuss major traffic trends and identify key challenges due to the adoption and operation of the new applications. Translating the key challenges to requirements for Future Internet traffic management mechanisms, the paper provides an overview of existing mechanisms in literature, assesses them w.r.t. the aforementioned requirements, and qualitatively estimates the expected optimization potential and gain, as well as provides hint for their potential extension and exploitation within the challenging environment of the Future Internet.