Service-based Internet Infrastructure for the Qatar World Cup 2022

Abstract

The shortcomings of today's Internet and the high demand for complex and sophisticated applications and services drive a very interesting and novel research area called Future Internet. The area of Future Internet research focuses on developing a new network with similar magnitude as today's Internet but with more demanding and complex design goals and specifications. It strives to solve the issues identified in today's Internet by capitalizing on the advantages of emerging new technologies in the area of computer networking such as Software Defined Networking (SDN), autonomic computing, and cloud computing. SDN represents an extraordinary opportunity to rethink computer networks, enabling the design and deployment of a future Internet. Utilizing these technologies leads to a significant progress in the development of an enhanced, secure, reliable, and scalable Internet. In 2022, Qatar will host the world cup where more than 5 Million people from all over the world are expected to attend. This event is expected to put the host country, Qatar, under massive pressure and huge challenges in terms of providing high quality Internet service especially with the increasing demand for emerging applications such as video streaming service over mobile devices. It is vital to evaluate and deploy state-of-the-art technologies based on a promising future Internet infrastructure in order to provide high-quality Internet services unique to this event and to the continuing rapid growth of the country. The main goal in this paper is to present a new network design with similar magnitude as today's Internet but with more demanding and complex design goals and specifications defined by the knowledge and experience gathered from four decades of using the current Internet. This research focuses on the development of a complete system, designed with the new requirements of the Future Internet in mind, and aims to provide, monitor and enhance the increasing demand for popular video streaming service. The testing environment was built using the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) testbed (see Figure 1). GENI, a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded research and development effort, aims to build a collaborative and exploratory network experimentation platform for the design, implementation and evaluation of future networks. Because GENI is meant to enable experimentation with large-scale distributed systems, experiments will in general always contain multiple communicating software entities. Large experiments may well contain tens of thousands of such communicating entities, spread across continental or transcontinental distances. The conducted experiments illustrate how such a system can function under unstable and changing network conditions, dynamically learn its environment, recognize potential service degradation problems, and react to these challenges in an autonomic manner without the need for human intervention.