Socio-Economic Issues in Future Generation Internet J.UCS Special Issue
Markus Fiedler, Klaus D. Hackbarth, Helmut Hlavacs · 2008
This Special Issue of the Journal of Universal Computer Science (J.UCS) is devoted to the Second EuroNGI/FGI Workshop on Socio-Economic Issues in Future Generation Internet (FGI). The FGI will offer multi-service/multimedia, mobility, service ubiquity and context awareness, convergence (services and fixed-mobile), Quality of Service, variable connectivity in the sense of “always best connected”, spontaneous networking and other capabilities as the norm. EuroFGI is a European Network of Excellence (NoE), sponsored by the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6), with the objective of developing and maintaining the most prominent European centre of excellence in Future Generation Internet (FGI) design and engineering and acting as a “Collective Intelligence Think Tank” which represents a major support for the European industry and leading towards a European leadership in this domain. Quality of Service (QoS) has been a hot topic within Internet-related research for many years. However, corresponding efforts have been contrasted with Internet merely providing connectivity and best-effort service. With the advent of new services such as Triple-Play (voice, video, Internet access) and the fact that some of these services will be charged per use, performance and economic issues regarding Internet and the trade-off between them are perhaps more important than ever before. This is amongst others witnessed by large efforts of major manufacturers and service providers for improving Quality of Experience (QoE) perceived from the users. Investments in networks, on the other hand, require detailed cost analyses. In addition, users need to be equipped with well-adapted security solutions in order to retain trust in networked services. Indeed, QoS and thus QoE relate to both performance and security and come at a cost. Thus, for any (future) Internet-based service, an optimal balance between performance, economy and security has to be found in order to make it well-accepted, which is pivotal to minimize the “Digital Divide”. Thus, coordination and cross-fertilization of the domains user-perceived quality, economy/costing and security is required, which was a major goal of the two workshops.