Telcos are adapting their business to address the rapid changing technology landscape (Moodley and van Olst 2011). Telcos require a flexible architecture to allow seamless adaptation and to leverage these new technologies to gain a competitive advantage (Moodley and van Olst 2011). This research is focused on the transport stratum as an extension to the OSA/Parlay gateway. The proposed OSA/Parlay Network Architecture and Interface has been designed. The OSA/Parlay Network Interface is characterised by openness, simplicity, API based, QoS support and technology independence. The OSA/Parlay Network Architecture features simplicity, technology independence, QoS mechanisms; call admission control; intelligent routing and supporting both federation of telcos and interoperation of legacy technologies. The OSA/Parlay Network Architecture and Interface has been demonstrated over a Java based Distributed Processing Environment (DPE) using CORBA. These architectural concepts and principles are demonstrated in a simulated environment and illustrate the Next Generation Network architectural characteristics. The research contribution therefore achieves an open architecture allowing for 3rd party application developers while also ensuring that call and service requests are provisioned end-to-end with guaranteed application level QoS in the transport network. The OSA/Parlay Network Architecture and Network Interface is synthesised from existing architectural standards and provides the following benefits. It is an extension of the OSA/Parlay standard by including the OSA/Parlay Network Architecture and Network Interface realises the OSA/Parlay next generation network. Both the OSA/Parlay Network Interface and the Network Architecture is specified in a technology agnostic manner. This ensures that the architecture remains future proof as it is not reliant on any particular technology. The long sought after Application level QoS is integrated into the architecture. The periodic network state updates inform the central Connection Coordinator object of both topological network changes as well as current performance of the constituent parts of the network. Intelligent routing of connections is achieved by adapting the Dijkstra algorithm to compute the best path based on dynamic network performance and is tested against QoS requirements, while the call admission control decision naturally allows for load balancing of connection paths within the network. This QoS mechanism achieves the goal of guaranteed QoS for a call admitted into the network.

The current IP based Internet architecture was designed in 70s. The development of new technologies and the evolution of Internet usages make the limitations of this design more visible, especially for the content delivery services. Facing this shortcoming, Van Jacobson and his PARC team proposed Content-Centric Network (CCN) in 2009. The CCN aims to build a content-oriented network, which means the entire networking architecture and all the networking activities are based on the content (content names in particular). The CCN proposal integrates many features such as on-path caching, security, multicast, and native mobility management. This novel proposal has many benefits but it brings also a lot of challenges for current hardware technologies. The transition from IP addresses to content names requires a large memory space to store the content names. However today's fast memory chip cannot meet this requirement. In this thesis I firstly focus on the PIT (Pending Interest Table) element in CCN routers. I propose a distributed PIT system based on the Bloom filter structure to reduce memory requirements and further improve routing performances. The principle of my proposal is that each CCN face manages its own PIT table instead of using a global table read/write lock for a centralized table. This distributed design resolves the information retrieval problem, which is a native shortcoming of Bloom filters. Thus treatment and routing speeds are improved. Thereafter I concentrate on the FIB (Forwarding Information Base) element. In the original CCN design, the FIB is filled by flooding content advertisement. With respect to the huge number of potential content names, this method not only explodes the capacity of FIB tables, but also introduces a high networking traffic. I propose a content-aware CCN forwarding system, which includes a content advertisement publish protocol, a FIB filling algorithm and a downstream forwarding element. In short, the content publish protocol requires that each advertisement is forwarded only towards certain nodes while the downstream forwarding element is a table that is in charge of discovering the other potential content sources. In the third contribution I propose an interface for interconnecting the CCN networking structure with the CDN services. The CDN service has so far been the way to address the content delivery issues of Internet. The key point of interconnecting CCN with CDN service is how to resolve the CDN repository miss-hit problem. The original CCN proposal does not enable efficient interconnection between CDN and CCN. I propose a system, which includes a CDN repository forwarding element and a CDN repository miss awareness mechanism. The former element is in charge of sending the related Interests towards the CDN repositories while the latter one aims to detect the CDN content miss and recover this lost.