Motivation
The Internet has seen a strong move to support overlay applications, which demand a coherent and integrated control in the underlying heterogeneous networks in a scalable, resilient, and energy-efficient manner. A tighter integration of network management and overlay service functionality can lead to cross-layer optimization of operations and management, thus, being a promising approach to offer a large business potential in operational perspectives for all players involved.

Therefore, SmartenIT (Socially-aware Management of New Overlay Application Traffic combined with Energy Efficiency in the Internet) targets at an incentive-compatible cross-layer network management for providers of overlay-based application (e.g., cloud applications, content delivery, and social networks), network providers, and end-users to ensure a QoE-awareness, by addressing accordingly load and traffic patterns or special application requirements, and exploiting at the same time social awareness (in terms of user relations and interests).

Moreover, the energy efficiency with respect to both end-user devices and underlying networking infrastructure is tackled to ensure an operationally efficient management. Incentive-compatible network management mechanisms for improving metrics in all layers and on an inter-domain basis for ISPs and telecommunication providers, serves as the major mechanism to deal with real-life scenarios. Such metrics and mechanisms encompass:

1. Inter-cloud communication through many operators where applications demand for dedicated traffic quality levels.

2. An integrated and energy-aware traffic management considering limited energy resources of mobile devices accessing the cloud.

3. The exploitation of meta-information by network operators for the purpose of socially-aware traffic
   management.

Selected scenarios are ported into test-beds, in which the effectiveness of appropriate traffic management mechanisms, integrated in an innovative architecture, is demonstrated.