VITAL++

Emerging types of applications, rich in user-created or provider-created content, enabled by P2P technology, with high demands for network resources are rapidly changing the landscape of network requirements and operations creating new challenges in network and service management, configuration, deployment, protocols etc. P2P is primarily a technology that fosters self-deployment and self-organisation, thus, reducing operational costs, while it achieves optimised resource utilisation for the deployed applications and services. In contrast, IMS as a control plane technology primarily addresses issues of heterogeneity of access technologies, addressing schemes, AAA, security and mobility management.

VITAL++ major objective is to combine and experiment with the best of the two worlds, namely, IMS-like control plane functionality and P2P technology giving rise into a new communication paradigm that will bring a wide range of benefits. The key to achieving this objective, is to put this paradigm under strenuous experimentation, carried out under realistic network conditions using popular applications. To this end, VITAL++ is putting together a pan-European testbed comprised of existing geographically distributed test sites integrated by IMS technology. This will be thoroughly tested by reference content applications and services that use P2P technology as a means for their distribution and achieving satisfactory QoS levels through network resource optimisation algorithms rather than non-scalable QoS reservation operations.