VON: Alcatel-Lucent CTO calls for P2P hybrids

BOSTON—Offering a “plumber’s view” of current and future networking trends, Paul Mankiewich, Alcatel-Lucent’s chief technology officer for North America, told VON attendees of the need for telcos to engage with an emerging class of mesh-centric service providers, adopting an approach that combines the best elements of peer-to-peer and traditional networking.

The new information economy is no longer just delivering voice and data to mobile phones, he said. It now encompasses triple play, quad play, fixed mobile convergence (FMC), as well as an emerging economy of social networking companies like YouTube, MySpace and Facebook. Telcos will have to work with the emerging world of social networking companies, which are service providers in their own right today, he said.

“As far as the plumber is concerned, [voice and data] comes from a centralized location and breaks down,” Mankiewich said. “That is going to change. As we move on, it will be more of a Bitband delivery of content…The telco will have to work with the emerging world, where it is more mesh-like.”

He credited YouTube as making up 25% of all the HDTV traffic and 10% of all Internet traffic. With this statistic in mind, he said the trend towards mesh architectures is driving the need for more symmetric network usage, direct network connectivity between Internet service providers and distributed service environments.

“In the newer days, you have technologies or companies like BitTorrent using peer-to-peer interaction to pull information simultaneously and do a download,” Mankiewich said. “It works, but it’s not as good as most users want to see. There is a lot of opportunity in the middle. Can we steal from each side and have a hybrid approach to combine the best of peer-to-peer and traditional content distribution?”

According to Mankiewich, the key to optimizing the network is what he called the Game Theory algorithm, which requires the traffic layer and the overlay layer to work together. As an example, he said that the VON Conference Web site was designed by people sitting at computers. The URL requires the use of a keyboard and is difficult to enter into a mobile phone. A better solution is needed to drive usability, he said -- a feature Apple has mastered, but most have not.

“It requires fairly significant modification of various components of the network to even out the performance in the mesh topology network,” Mankiewich said.

One solution, he said, is Alcatel-Lucent’s augmented reality technology, which lets a client device interpret a live video over a mobile device for increased usability and interaction.

“I have my mobile phone, and it has a camera in it,” Mankiewich said. “I put the camera on some object, such as a page in magazine, and the network goes out and grabs whatever content is important and plays it on the phone.”

Sticking with social networking, Mankiewich cited an example of a user pointing his or her mobile phone at a student wearing a t-shirt purchased from Facebook. Instantaneously, a video from that student’s Facebook account would show up on the screen. When the user clicks the video, he or she would be taken to the student’s Facebook Web page. The converged end user would not be aware of the network.

“A lot of IMS is built around the idea of portability and mobility,” Mankiewich said. “I believe that the IMS world will talk to the Microsoft IPTV world and the Web 2.0 world, and there will be hooks between the two…In the IMS space, a lot of the service providers, using a lot of roaming, are driving IMS but not without the IP world.”