Abstract

Abstract The Internet is in a state of constant flux. This property of the Internet, that stems from the pressure from its continuously reinvented usage, makes it a lively environment, which must be re-assessed fundamentally from time to time. In this article, we review recent trends that have radically changed our perception of what the Internet is. Popular applications such as Youtube and Facebook have demonstrated the massive scale at which services can be delivered across the Internet. This has been possible only thanks to the massive deployment in content delivery infrastructures, leading to the rise of the Cloud paradigm. Recent studies from the research community have observed the consequences of this growth in the Internet infrastructure, through structural changes in the Internet topology and traffic patterns. The increasingly dynamic nature of Internet traffic patterns asks for improved capabilities to engineer traffic, that require a completely different level of programmability from the network. Software-defined networking is expected to fill this gap. Overall, the picture of the Internet that we draw in this article is the one of a very dynamic, challenging, and exciting playground. Zusammenfassung abstract in german 2