COAST · COntent Aware Searching, retrieval and sTreaming

Towards the Future Internet age, COAST aims to build a Future Content-Centric Network (FCN) architecture, able to offer network-wide Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in service discovery and content consumption. In COAST FCN, the users will specify solely which content or web service they need and the COAST framework will find and deliver the desired or the most relevant data in an efficient, timely, user-/network-friendly way.To achieve this goal, COAST will focus on three key innovation pillars:• On the fly" identification and distributed "on-line" discovery. COAST will create a content-aware network of intelligent nodes, which will a) "on the fly" (at wire speed) identify/classify content and identify Web services via inspection of the traffic that flows through the nodes and b) discover "on line" (in a distributed manner), where services are located and content is located/cached, in order to optimally match users' requests with availability.• Content-Aware Delivery Architecture. COAST will discover the underlying network infrastructure (including mobile networks), and construct content-aware overlays to offer distributed and robust content delivery with optimal utilisation of the networking topology and resources, leading to improved PQoS.• Future media content adaptation and enrichment. COAST will provide for scalable, HD 3D/free-viewpoint video, which is on-the-fly adapted, enriched and optimized to the user preferences, network and terminal characteristics.COAST will be validated over: a) large scale testbeds: the Pan-European OneLab/PanLab-II and the PlanetLab/GENI and b) the TID's "User Experience Lab" and the "Digital Home Labs" (FTTH services).COAST will eventually provide the architectural and technological innovations for incremental deployment of intelligent services into the network with the aim of optimizing the EU citizens' experience for A/V networked applications and meeting network-wide SLAs in the Future Content Internet."