Integrated Project under the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7)

British Telecommunications Public Limited Company
Deutsche Telekom AG
NEC Europe Ltd.
Nokia Oyj
Roke Manor Research Limited
Athens University of Economics and Business
Research Center Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
University College London
Université catholique de Louvain
EURESCOM – European Institute for Research and Strategic Studies in Telecommunications GmbH
Stanford University

January 2008 to March 2011

The aim of Trilogy is to develop new solutions for the control architecture of the Internet that remove the known and emerging technical deficiencies while avoiding prejudging commercial and social outcomes for the different players. The focus is the control functions of the Internet – the neck of the hourglass, but for control.
Despite the phenomenal growth of the Internet over the last twenty years, we believe that the current Internet is reaching the fundamental limits of its capabilities. Performance and resilience demands are increasing at the same time that operational and business limitations imposed by the architecture are becoming more constricting. Future growth to meet these challenges will require not only new technologies from the leading edges of networking research, but also architectural changes which may be subtle but far reaching. The Trilogy project has a vision of a coherent, integrated and future-proof architecture that unifies the heterogeneous network, offering immediate deployment rewards coupled with long-term stability.
There are two key ideas behind the Trilogy Concept. The first key idea is technical; the traditional separation between congestion control, routing mechanisms, and business demands (as reflected in policy) is the direct cause of many of the problems which are leading to a proliferation of control mechanisms, fragmentation of the network into walled gardens, and growing scalability issues. Re-architecting these mechanisms into a more coherent whole is essential if these problems are to be tackled.
The second key idea is more abstract, but fundamental. It recognises that the success of the Internet derives not directly from its transparency and self-configuration, but from the fact that it is architected for change. The Internet seamlessly supports evolution in application use and adapts to configuration changes; deficiencies have arisen where it is unable to accommodate new types of business relationship. To make the Internet richer and more capable will require more sophistication in its control architecture, but without imposing a single organisational model. Therefore, our key principles are to retain the ubiquity enabled by the hourglass model, and take the self-configuration philosophy one level further: we seek a control architecture for the new Internet that can adapt in a scalable, dynamic, autonomous and robust manner to local operational and business requirements.

NEC is leading the work on Reachability which includes topics such a routing, multi-homing, traffic engineering and traffic filtering. NEC further contributes to the resource control related work such as admission control and congestion control and some work on social and commercial control is also done within the framework of the project.

J. Schneider, J. Wagner, R. Winter, H.-J. Kolble, Out of my Way – Evaluating Low Extra Delay Background Transport in an ADSL Access Network, 22st International Teletraffic Congress (ITC22), Amsterdam, September 2009.

R. Winter, Two Steps Towards Practical Compact Routing, 21st International Teletraffic Congress (ITC21), Paris, September 2009

M. Bagnulo, L. Burness, P. Eardley, A. García-Martínez, F. Valera, R. Winter, Joint Multi-path Routing and Accountable Congestion Control, ICT Mobile Summit, Santander, June 2009

R. Winter, Modeling the Internet Routing Topology with a Known Degree of Accuracy - in less than 24h, ACM/IEEE/SCS Workshop on Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation (PADS 2009), Lake Placid, June 2009

R. Karrer, P. Eardley, L. Eggert, M. Ford, P. Sarolahti, R. Widera, R. Winter, Towards A Unified Internet Control Architecture, International Conference on Future Internet Technologies (CFI 2008), Seoul, June 2008

R. Karrer, R. Winter, The Internet: A Fragile Success, KuVS Future Internet Workshop, Heidelberg, June 2008

Official Trilogy Web Site