Posts of Building the Future Internet

ITU-T SG13 Q16 Rapporteur Meeting

2013-07-04T09:27:16.954Z

On June 18 and 21, 2013, members of the UZH delegation (coordinator of SmartenIT and formerly SESERV) attended the ITU-T SG13 Rapporteur meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, to contribute to the development of ITU recommendation Y.FNsocioeconomic, which is aimed at “Economic Incentives of Future Networks”. The development of this document stems from efforts of the SESERV project, which initiated the development of the document within ITU-T’s Q21/13 in 2011. The document that is now development within ITU-T’s Q16/13 addresses “Environmental and socio-economic sustainability in future networks and early realization of FN”.

In the ITU-T SG13 study group meeting in February it was decided to add a section to Y.FNsocioeconomic that explains to ITU members how to best integrate the socio-economic analysis (by the means of tussle analysis) proposed within Y.FNsocioeconomic in the standardization of Future Networks. A main output of the current meeting was to generalize this section to explain how the proposed socio-economic analysis can be deployed by standardization bodies in general.

The section on “service universalization” which was added in the February meeting to Y.FNsocioeconomic, in order to better comply with ITU recommendation Y.3001 was moved to a separate document during the current meeting, to clearly focus Y.FNsocioeconomic on economic incentives. The now-removed section on service universalization was added to Y.FNsocioeconomic in February, since Y.FNsocioeconomic was started to develop a methodology to better achieve the objective of “social and economic awareness”, which, as pointed out in February, implies, according to Y.3001, not only the design goal of "economic incentives" but also the design goal of “service universalization”. Besides this removal also informative content was removed or moved to the appendix.

The next editorial iteration for Y.FNsocioecomic will happen during SG13 Rapporteur meeting in November 4-15, 2013. The UZH delegation will provide contributions to this iteration that are to be developed in the framework of SmartenIT´s socio-economic research facet and evaluates potential to channel technical SmartenIT research to ITU-T recommendations as well.

Future Internet Reference Architecture Group: Towards architectural design principles and a reference architecture for the Future Internet

2012-03-09T08:58:00.062Z

The outcome of the activity of the FIArch Group towards the identification and definition of the Design Principles that should dominate the architecture of the FI was included in a white paper called “Future Internet Design Principles”, EC INFSO, 2012, available in: http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/foi/docs/fiarchdesignprinciples-v1.pdf

The purpose of this activity was to address FI architecture requirements as described in the previous document produced by the FIArch Group called “Fundamental Limitations of current Internet and the path to Future Internet”, 2011, also available in: http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/foi/library/docs/current-internet-limitations-v9.pdf

In the first part of the open workshop, the white paper itself as the outcome of the Group activities over the last one year was presented to the audience. In particular, the following presentations were given:

· Our Understanding of the Internet Architecture Design Principles, Theodore Zahariadis (Synelixis)

· Principles that should be preserved, Pedro Martinez Julia (University of Murcia)

· Principles that should be adapted, Dimitri Papadimitriou (Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs)

· Principles that should be augmented, Paul Mueller (Technical University of Kaiserlautern)

· Seeds of new design principles, Ioanna Papafili (Athens University of Economics and Business)

Additionally, Anastasios Gavras (Eurescom) gave a presentation on how FIRE (Future Internet Research and Experimentation, http://www.ict-fire.eu/) could be employed to perform experiments towards the proof of the proposed principles value.

In the second part of the open workshop, presentations were given by invited experts/speakers:

· Future Networks Architecture, Alex Galis (University College London)

· Service Awareness Architecture, Oliver Festor (EIT ICT Labs)

· Future Internet Research and Experimentation, Juanjo Hierro (TID)

In the third part of the workshop, a discussion moderated by Francesco Torelli (Engineering) was performed on the design principles that have been presented where the attendees were asked to provide their opinion on how much issues such as net neutrality, service awareness, socioeconomics, etc. are adequately addressed by the current document. Feedback received will be used as input to revise, update and further improve the current document.

Finally, in the wrap-up, the concluding of the work that has been done so far was done by Dimitri Papadimitriou (ALBL); open issues have been identified and action points were set, and next steps planning has been performed. In particular, next steps include the following:

· Address asap the comments on the Future Internet Design Principles received by the workshop attendees,

· Prepare two new documents targeting on the systematic analysis of architectural input provided by EU projects: one on measurements (criteria/metrics) and analysis methodology, and one on the analysis itself.

A brief version of the white paper “Future Internet Design Principles” has been re-edited and submitted as candidate chapter to the 4^th FIABook, 2012 - From Technological Promises to Reality, http://www.future-internet.eu/fiabook-2012 and is currently still under review.

IEEE Communications Magazine Article on Future Networks

2013-03-26T16:09:19.056Z

The current issue of the IEEE Communications Magazine features an article that describes ITU-T´s standardization activities in Future Networks (FNs). This article termed "Toward Future Networks: A Viewpoint from ITU-T" presents details of FN standardization and focuses on ITU-T´s achieved results and future plans in this area. It describes FNs as "networks to be deployed roughly in the 2015–2020 timeframe" and states that ITU takes the top down as well as the bottom up approach to standardize these networks. The former approach is motivated by the fact that consensus on larger trends and issues, such as data explosion and environmental issues, exists. The article explicitly discusses ITU-T´s Recommendation Y.3001 that describes objectives and design goals for future networks (FNs). In particular, Y.3001 identifies the four objectives (i) service awareness, (ii) data awareness, (iii) environmental awareness, and (iv) social and economic awareness, which are described by the article as "[...] fundamental issues to which not enough attention was paid in designing current networks”. The four objectives are refined by twelve design goals, that serve to achieve them. Because the article discusses these objectives and design goals, it also introduces ITU-T Study Group 13 (SG13), which has the lead for FN standardization within ITU-T and therefore developed Y.3001.

Since SG13 started its activities already in 2009, when the discussion of FNs was in an early stage, it was decided that "it is very important to listen to the voices of not only ITU-T members, but also experts including researchers outside of ITU-T", as cited from the article. Due to this decision, members of the UZH delegation (coordinator of SmartenIT and SESERV) support SG13´s standardization activities since 2011 and in particular develop recommendation Y.FNsocioeconomic, which is aimed at the socio-economic aware design of future network technology. Therefore Y.FNsocioeconomic proposes tussle analysis to achieve Y.3001´s fourth objective “Social and Economic Awareness”, which is described by the article as the "[...] aim to take into consideration social and economical aspects when realizing the [network] architecture." The proposed tussle analysis methodology was developed by the SESERV project to evaluate and address socio-economic factors during the design phase of (FN) technology. It is proposed in Y.FNsocioeconomic to implement "Economic incentives", which is a design goal necessary for the objective of social and economic awareness. As also named by the article, the other necessary design goal is "service universalization". Since it was hitherto not included in Y.FNsocioeconomic, it was decided during the last SG13 meeting in March, to also include it. However, input for an according section will not be provided by the UZH delegation but by other volunteering experts, more knowledgeable about this area.

When recommendations for the four objectives are discussed, the article names “mobility” as a recommendation related to service awareness and defines it as the “movement support of virtual resources including users and services”. This is highly relevant for SmartenIT, as the project declared "Global service mobility" as one of its three major scenarios and therefore may contribute achieved results to the development of ITU-T recommendations.

The article´s section dedicated to recommendations related to socio-economic awareness states that "Network architecture indirectly but certainly affects society and business by providing the playing field for social activity and business", wherefore Y.3001 also considers social and economic issues despite its technical focus. The section then explicitly names and discusses Y.FNsocioeconomic that is introduced as a "[...] framework to anticipate the socio-economic impact of the technology during its design." Subsequently, the document and accordingly tussle analysis is elaborated in more detail whereupon the section concludes that the introduced methodology helps to "design a technology for FNs that is in line with the respective socio-economic design goals and objectives".

When the document discusses future plans, it is stated that, due to the rising relevance of standardization activities of FNs, SG13 decided to "divide the group involved in standardization of FNs into three groups", that focus on (i) service awareness including SDN, (ii) data awareness, and (iii) environment and socio-economic awareness and short-term realization of FNs, respectively. Due to this structural change, it became necessary to house Y.FNsocioeconomic in one of these three groups, in order to continue its development. This step was recently successfully taken by the UZH delegation in the last SG13 meeting in March. In particular, UZH proposed to continue the development of the document within ITU-T’s Q16/13, which is the third of the newly established groups and addresses “Environmental and socio-economic sustainability in future networks and early realization of FN”. The group is therefore considered a perfect match for the further development of the document by the UZH delegation. The article closes by acknowledging amongst others Martin Waldburger, who is UZH´s driving force in ITU-T engagements, for his “work and contributions to the ITU-T FN activities”.

The next editorial iteration for Y.FNsocioecomic will happen during SG13 Rapporteur meeting in June 17-28, 2013, and during SG13 meeting in November 4-15, 2013. The UZH delegation, which is constituted by members of UZH´s Communication Systems Group (CSG), will provide contributions to these iterations that are to be developed in the framework of SmartenIT´s and Flamingo´s socio-economic research facets. Furthermore, the CSG also evaluates potential to refine technical SmartenIT and Flamingo research to be contributed to ITU-T recommendations.

ITU-T Study Group 13 Meeting

2013-03-19T13:14:26.285Z

On February 25 and 27, 2013, members of the UZH delegation (coordinator of SmartenIT) attended the ITU-T SG13 meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, to contribute to the development of ITU recommendation Y.FNsocioeconomic, which is aimed at the “Socio-economic Aware Design of Future Network Technology”. The development of this document stems from efforts of the SESERV project, that initiated the development of the document within ITU in 2011. The study period, that the development of the document was started in, recently ended, wherefore a new Question to develop the document in, became necessary. Thus, the first proposal of SmartenIT attendants was to continue the development of the document within an ITU-T’s Q16/13, that addresses “Environmental and socio-economic sustainability in future networks and early realization of FN” and is therefore considered a perfect match for the further development of the document. Secondly, editorial and structural changes were proposed. Third, the addition of a section that explains to ITU members how to best integrate the socio-economic analysis (by the means of tussle analysis) proposed within Y.FNsocioeconomic in the standardization of Future Networks was suggested. All three proposals were well received by the meeting participants. However, the valuable feedback given during the meeting led to agree on significant extensions and adaptions of the document, as discussed subsequently.

ITU recommendation Y.3001 identified objectives and design goals for future networks, two of which were "social and economic awareness" (objective) and "economic incentives" (design goal). Y.FNsocioeconomic was started to develop a methodology to better achieve these two criteria. As pointed out by meeting participants, the objective of “social and economic awareness” implies the design goal “service universalization” (besides "economic incentives"), which was hitherto not addressed by Y.FNsocioeconomic. Since the document attracted meeting participants, these volunteered to provide content for such an additional section until the next Study Group meeting. To further improve consistency with Y.3001, the scope of the document will be adapted and the title was changed to “Social and Economic Awareness of Future Networks” (cf. Y.3001 Section 7.4).

The next editorial iteration for Y.FNsocioecomic will happen during SG13 Rapporteur meeting in June 17-28, 2013, and during SG13 meeting in November 4-15, 2013. The UZH delegation will provide contributions to these iterations that are to be developed in the framework of SmartenIT´s socio-economic research facet and evaluates potential to channel technical SmartenIT research to ITU-T recommendations as well.

New Cloud Research Facility Opens

2013-02-06T08:58:43.658Z

BonFIRE is pleased to announce that its cloud experimentation and testing facility is now open to the public. Developers, researchers and SMEs from organisations and collaborative projects are invited to test their ideas for cloud-based applications and services for FREE.

BonFIRE offers:

* A multi-site cloud facility for applications, services and systems experimentation

* Large-scale, heterogeneous and virtualised compute, storage and networking resources

* Full control of your resource deployment

* In-depth monitoring and logging

* Advanced cloud and network features

* Ease of use for experimentation

* High quality documentation and online support

To find out more and apply online, visit: www.bonfire-project.eu/involved

CfP: AIMS 2013 Conference

2012-11-12T13:03:07.034Z

The 7th International Conference on Autonomous Infrastructure, Management and Security (AIMS 2013)

June 25-28, 2013, UPC Barcelona, Spain
http://www.aims-conference.org/2013/

The AIMS conference is a single-track event integrating normal conference paper sessions, tutorials, keynotes, and a PhD student workshop into a highly interactive event. One of the goals of AIMS is to look beyond borders and to stimulate the exchange of ideas across researchers of different communities and among PhD students. Furthermore, AIMS 2013 integrates 1.5 days of courses and labs which offer hands-on learning experiences in network and service management topics and which require attendees to work in practical on-site courses combined with preceding short tutorial-like teaching sessions.

AIMS 2013 focuses on the theme of managing and monitoring of next-generation networks, network security and services. New paradigms as well as autonomic and fully distributed algorithms, virtualization and monitoring techniques or self-organizing overlays have to be investigated to design scalable and resilient frameworks able to deal with dynamic environments providing big data to process while also protecting privacy. The design, monitoring, configuration and protection of the next generation of networked systems in an efficient, secure, and autonomic manner are crucial to commercially viable and successful networks and services.

Authors are invited to submit papers on the following topics, including related fields:

SmartenIT - EU STREP on "Socially-aware Management of New Overlay Application Traffic combined with Energy Efficiency in the Internet"

2012-11-05T14:56:59.797Z

The new STREP SmartenIT 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 in the cloud and on-line social networks domain.

UZH coordinates this STREP and will be responsible for the tasks of "Overlay Traffic Management Solutions" as well as "External Liaisons". As such, UZH is in the perfect position to to collaborate with AUEB, being a project partner, too, to address traffic management aspects and the SESERV-established network of experts in due course.

Internet of Services encourages end-user participation

2012-11-05T14:07:06.272Z

In amongst the many sessions at the recent Internet of Services Collaboration Meeting, there were a couple of side sessions on participation and the socio-economics of the Future Internet of particular interest in view of the outcomes from the various SESERV workshops: Participatory Service Design chaired by Kevin Doolin and Techno Socio Economics by Francesco Bellini, with contributions from i2Web, SEQUOIA, SESERV, SocIoS and SOCIETIES, as well as the new MARKOS project.

The SOCIETIES presentation looked at ways of including end-users in service development, getting their input directly to the developers; whilst
i2Web were mapping out the needs and common practices of disadvantaged user groups;
the new MARKOS project is about taking open-source type collaboration to online communities;
The SocIoS presentation looked at the economic principle and social dynamics of managing content from a quasi commercial basis;
Two SEQUOIA presentations looked at the methodology of assessing socio-economic impact and then moved onto current results from applying this approach; whilst
our SESERV IoS Presentation reviewed evidence that end-users are already active and willing participants despite the various challenges, and suggesting the Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE) needs to start looking elsewhere to keep the impetus going for Future Internet (FI) development.

At the end of the day, the presentations during the sessions threw up three common themes, with particular relevance to the DAE (cf for instance we reviewed the current status of the DAE as detailed here)

Inclusion: The DAE is particularly concerned with access for all, taking fast and ultra-fast connectivity to target levels of penetration (DAE Pillar 4, with attendant focus on interoperability in Pillar 2). Bogliolo had already expressed in a blanket push for certain levels of coverage in Brussels, pointing out that reaching a given level did not necessarily mean that access would be available to everyone after all (Alessandro Bogliolo's presentation can be viewed here). But more significantly at the IoS collaboration meeting, it was pointed out that: even disadvantaged users will go to great lengths to exploit what access they have (i2Web); and collaborative environments (SocIoS, and the specialised developer environment of MARKOS) are looking for new ways to engage end-users. Notwithstanding EC efforts to ensure access (for instance, the rather disturbing No Disconnect Strategy) and earlier comments on the Arab Spring and the London Riots (in SESERV Deliverable D3.1 and SESERV Deliverable D3.2), we come back to the conclusions that however difficult end-users will participate, using their own rules, and their input is not only what they want (a summary of cross-thematic issues from the SESERV Oxford workshop here) but useful.
Checks and balances: In a presentation by Dorit Geifman from SocIoS, the focus was on the economics of Intellectual Property-type content, what it is, and how it might be handled, a topic referred to as part of DAE Pillar 1. This becomes particularly relevant in light of an implicit suggestion that such content comprises "cultural" output only. But we already know that a significant amount of content that is transmitted across the Internet is leisure-based (for instance gaming-related) and such content is causing significant concern for the carrier networks at the very least. The DAE itself is based on a premise that user consumption will drive a virtuous (economic) cycle in support of European economic growth, with Pillar 1 emphasising the digital market place and Pillar 2 the need for interoperability. What is missing though is the realisation that end-users are now prosumers or co-creators of web content, which cannot simply be ignored on the basis of low cultural appeal measured in traditional terms (cf SESERV Deliverable D3.2).

At the same time, though, there is an increasing and encouraging desire to look at the socio-economics of technology and technology projects. The SEQUOIA project has developed guidelines to assess the socio-economic impact of current or planned work. These include concrete issues for sustainability in terms of project contribution rather than the straight-forward environmental issues highlighted in DAE Pillar 7. As was presented at the workshop, the approach is relevant to a number of projects and is already showing results.
Moving forward: The theme of the Collaboration Meeting was very much where next for the IoS. In these particular side sessions, the emphasis was very much on capturing and understanding what end-users need and how they behave. It's all about taking on board the efforts to which they will go and their experiences when using what they can (i2Web), about capitalising on their input (whether it's seen in terms of content - SocIoS - or actual software development - MARKOS), and most of all making it easy to express and realise user dreams (SOCIETIES). The DAE laid the foundation perhaps which allowed technologists to come this far; but it now needs revising (SESERV) to accommodate actual end-user engagement, and the knock-on effects for service providers and operators.

These two sessions were valuable for the different aspects of service and user engagement they presented, in the main looking forward to where project outcomes were or could be heading. From a SESERV perspective, the findings of the project's focus group discussions and workshops have much to say in this environment. In her SOCIETIES presentation, Jacqueline Floch presented a useful summary diagram: the Internet world today and perhaps in the future (see Stephen Minton's comments about pervasive devices and the IoT) is based on the Internet of Things: as we have found, we cannot underestimate the effects this will have on quality of service as well as quality of experience for content and services delivered across backbone infrastructures; on that basis (ie the IoT), different services are being developed, these have to engage and involve all stakeholders, not least the end-users; these end-users are people, and despite concerns around trust and confidence in the web security (cf DAE Pillar 3 and Alan Hartman's description of how users develop and technologies should maintain trust), they will and do do what they see fit, exploiting their experiences in a social-network context beyond the "fifteen minutes of fame" originally envisaged to shape the Future Internet as a collaborative environment for future participation and social and political engagement.

2012 Future Network and Mobile Summit (FuNeMS 2012)

2012-09-25T14:21:50.260Z

Session 2d entitled “Future Internet Architecture” hosted presentations from academic, research and industrial institutions, covering a broad range of research topics related to Future Internet. Its purpose was to allow researchers present their ideas and get feedback from the audience on converged networks and management systems, experimentation for new protocols and socioeconomic aspects of the Future Internet.

Key themes from the session were an increasing need for:

1) treating control and data packets separately, even though the overhead caused must be carefully considered

2) handling mobility and multi-homing seamlessly, even though routing protocols must be carefully designed to handle frequent changes

3) testing the harmonic operation of multiple protocols

4) understanding the socio-economic aspects of Future Internet technologies

Similarly, Workshop 3d: Cloud Networking hosted presentations and a panel from academic and research institutions on the technical and business challenges of converged cloud computing and networking.

Bartosz Belter, from Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (Poland) and the GEYSERS project explained the need for having converged infrastructures (network and IT) and described their approach of using testbeds for evaluating the innovation and demonstration impact in a wide range of use cases.

Daniel Turull from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden and SAIL project described Libnetvirt, a network virtualization library for linux systems, since although virtualization technologies exist, these are very technology dependent and not suitable for dynamic environments.

Markus Fiedler from Blekinge Institute of Technology (Sweden) gave a presentation on performance of virtualized routers by examining whether isolation is feasible on different timescales using XEN hypervisor technology. He concluded that sharing of infrastructures has negative effects on performance isolation of different virtual resources and we could increase isolation but this would depend on the application requirements.

Finally, Anna Tzanakaki, AIT (Greece) in her presentation focused on how an operator should use the virtual infrastructures when dealing with network and IT resources. The optimal planning scheme was found to be the joint consideration of network & IT (instead of a simpler approach based on the location of a single infrastructure type).

The panelists’ statements revealed that the cloud technology as such serves a quite good standing, however, that the service quality levels vary depending on the layer. In addition, the level of security, the non-availability of accounting technology for virtualized environments, and the lack of control for cloud users seem to determine major drawbacks as of today.

In terms of business models the demand for user quality-related contracts as well as clear price-cost-based relation for offered services are demanded, but not available. Real guarantees for services offered need to be reflected in appropriate business models, which need to inter-relate technology-specific solutions with operational costs of clouds.

The discussion touched upon various issues, especially, the energy-saving argument for cloud services – but different panelists’ statements indicated that an optimal solution of utilization as well as energy savings may not be achievable, mainly due to the lack of realistic models for cloud services in terms of their technical needs (bandwidth, storage, usage behavior) and relevant cloud service models (which users need them at which location in the world and a which time). As such, energy-related questions can be answered only for dedicated use cases and well-defined scenarios.

Additionally, the “closer” metric for data and users in a cloud sees two different replies: (a) “closer” is driven the domain (legal, administrative), which determines the most remote location data in the cloud may see due to specific application demands and (b) “closer” is depending on the response time a user requires for a certain service.

The relevance of FuNeMS 2012 for SESERV’s was visible in a number of important topics. Firstly, the role of business models (thus, the economics of services and future networks) was clearly visible in Session 2d as well as the cloud workshop’s presentations and panel. Quoting David Kennedy, the chairman of Session 2d, “[…] all, finally, come down to the pockets of the stakeholders“ verified the community’s interest in understanding the socio-economic dimension of Future Internet architectures. Secondly, the importance of the user (determining a human being, thus, a social individual) revealed that user-perceived Quality-of-Experience (QoE), user control besides providers’ control and operational robustness, and security mechanisms for cloud-based service offerings in a fully decentralized, potentially world-wide service cloud are highly demanding. Nevertheless, the need for observing legal boundaries and state lines for certain cloud services as well as the lack of convincing Service Level Agreements with valuable, meaningful, and accountable parameters form still major obstacles for a number of commercially applicable services for companies. This seems to be less important these days for mass market cloud services for private end-user demands, such as for picture storage, social media, and smaller computing demands.

EUNICE Conference on Information and Communications Technologies (EUNICE 2012)

2012-09-14T12:09:00.002Z

The 18^th EUNICE Conference on Information and Communications Technologies (EUNICE 2012) was held in Budapest, Hungary on August 29-31, 2012. It was organized and hosted by the Department of Telecommunications and Media Informatics, Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME).

During the EUNICE 2012 conference Christos Tsiaras, Ph.D. student at the University of Zurich, presented his paper on “The Design of a Single Funding Point Charging Architecture” (co-authored by Martin Waldburger, Guilherme Sperb Machado, Andrei Vancea, and Burkhard Stiller). This work proposed a charging architecture for federated environments where the users can access and pay for resources offered by organizations, which belong in the same federation. Authors claimed that such architecture would lead to cautious usage of the resources by the users, as well as the decrement of unnecessary infrastructure replication inside the federation. Furthermore, the future of the mobile communication was covered extensively from a technical as well as an economical point of view. The impact to the society, of the mobile operators willingness to invest as minimum as possible in new technologies and infrastructure was partially expressed by Konrad Walczyk on his talk about the “Techno-economic comparison of next-generation access networks for the French market”. Similar situations, with the one described by Konrad, exist in most of the European Union country members where the regulator authorities strategies are aligned.

The program of EUNICE 2012 is accessible and proceedings appeared in the Springer Series LNCS vol. 7479 and areavailable on-line.

LIBER Steering Committee for Heritage Collections and Preservation

2012-07-09T11:38:49.519Z

The LIBER Steering Committee for Heritage Collections and Preservation meeting in Florence Italy on May 7-8 included a keynote presentation by SESERV participant Eric Meyer, speaking on the theme of “Partnering for Web Archives: Preserving the Web, Enabling Research”. The talk focused on the born digital public content held in web archives, and the challenge of using these data for research purposes. My group has written several reports in recent years (for JISC and the IIPC) on research engagement (or lack thereof) with web archives, and has highlighted the fact that one of the biggest disconnects at the moment is that while archives of the web are being increasingly preserved, the tools and methods for doing research from these archives is less well-developed that doing research on the live web. I will argue that the range of partners who should be involved in preserving web archives needs to extend far beyond the preservation community - into the community of researchers (such as sociologists, political scientists, communications scholars, and information scientists) who are the natural researchers of such materials, but also into the newly developing areas of 'big data' where efforts to mine the streams of data being generated on the web are being seen to hold massive value both for understanding society but also for generating economic benefit.

Keynote Announcement: Alan Hartman (IBM)

2012-06-05T12:39:41.584Z

Alan Hartman, Senior Researcher at IBM, will present at the SESERV-organized workshop Socio-economic Certainties and Change for the Future Internet:

Trust and Security are ongoing struggles in all facets of the Future Internet.  Alan Hartman of IBM Research presents the research issues central to the study of the measurement and management of trust in a business context.

The workshop will take place in Brussels on June 20, 2012, right before the Digital Agenda Assembly. Participation is open and free-of-charge. Take the opportunity and register on-line.

On the Speaker

Alan Hartman is currently a senior researcher at the IBM Israel Haifa Research Laboratory in the department of Privacy and Security. His work is focused on long term privacy preservation in the context of the ENSURE project.

After a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Waterloo in Canada, Alan joined the IBM Haifa Research Lab in 1983. Since then, his research has focused on storage technologies, mathematical optimization, hardware and software verification, model based software, systems, and services engineering, and privacy. He spent 2.5 years at the IBM India research lab in Bangalore serving as the Services Science, Management, and Engineering (SSME) focal point for the IBM India Research Laboratory. He has also held positions at the IBM Israel Laboratory as the manager of the algorithms and optimization team, and the model-driven engineering technologies group. He has held visiting positions in the Mathematics Department at the University of Toronto and at Telstra Research Labs. He has also coordinated and managed several European Commission research projects (AGEDIS, MODELWARE, MODELPLEX, COCKPIT). Alan has a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Newcastle in Australia, an M.Sc. in mathematics from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, and a B.Sc. in mathematics from Monash University in Australia. He has published over 60 research papers and holds several patents.

Keynote Announcement: Javier Salcedo (Arsys)

2012-06-08T09:25:43.183Z

Javier Salcedo, Product Director at Arsys, will present at the SESERV-organized workshop Socio-economic Certainties and Change for the Future Internet:

Cloud computing's strong entrance into the infrastructure market has seen success. As customers are introduced to an expanding choice in offerings and opportunities, naturally the expectations to meet higher requirements and needs have arrived.  Arsys, a Cloud hosting leader, shows us how Cloud offerings are rising to the socio-economic challenges.

The workshop will take place in Brussels on June 20, 2012, right before the Digital Agenda Assembly. Participation is open and free-of-charge. Take the opportunity and register on-line.

On the Speaker

Javier has a Telecommunications Engineering degree in the Saragosse University. He started working for Accenture in 2004, participating in a worldwide process standardization project for BT Global Services. He joined Arsys in 2006 and has taken different roles in the IT Service Management, Dedicated and Managed Hosting and Presales areas. He's currently Product Director taking responsibility over the overall portfolio, including cloud computing services, managed hosting and web hosting.

Socio-economics at the Joint ITU-T / ISO Workshop on "Future Networks Standardization"

2012-06-21T14:24:41.598Z

On June 11, 2012, the one-day Joint ITU-T SG 13 and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 6 Workshop on “Future Networks Standardization” took place at ITU Headquarters, in Geneva, Switzerland. Both the ITU-T and the ISO have study groups focusing on standardizing Future Networks (FN). Accordingly, this workshop's goal was to identify commonalities and differences in the work progressed by each group, and to assess if those differences can be solved.

Representatives of the ITU-T as well as of ISO gave insight into ongoing activities regarding FN standardization. It became clear in many presentations throughout the workshop that FN technology reaches out to socio-economic and environmental dimensions in multiple ways. In consequence, FNs were characterized by Takashi Egawa, Rapporteur of Question 21, ITU-T SG13, as follows:

"Future networks are not limited to network aspects but consider all aspects of networking and services. Future networks do not consider only technical issues but also environmental and socioeconomic aspects."

In this context, Martin Waldburger (University of Zurich, SESERV) stressed in his presentation why socio-economic awareness is necessary for the development of FN technology. In that respect he stated that many technologies have been found to lack in terms of marked adoption - which, to a great extent, may be rooted in a technology design that was not incentive-compatible with the relevant stakeholders. He explained that engineers typically think of technical design goals and in doing so may risk to neglect the socio-economic layer of technology. Accordingly, the traditional design goals of effectiveness, efficiency, modularity, and security will remain important, while he argued that (since FN technology will reach multiple stakeholders) the understanding of socio-economic aspects will facilitate already at design time an anticipation of an FN technology's impact.

He then referred to the social and economic awareness objective stated in the ITU-T Recommendation Y.3001 just as the economic incentive design goal. He argued that Y.3001 recommends technologies to be designed to these ends, but lacks recommendations on suited methods to achieve the socio-economic design goals and objectives that Y.3001 defines. This lack of recommended methods to anticipate the socio-economic impact of FN technology at design time constitutes the motivation and main scope for the Y.FNsocioeconomic Recommendation (Y.FNsocioeconomic is currently in draft status). He continued by discussing the structure of Y.FNsocioeconomic, including the tussle concept, tussle analysis, and recommended methods to implement the three major steps of the tussle analysis. He then presented a short tussle evolution example and he outlined the structure of the tussle analysis meta-method. He concluded that engineers need to be aware of socio-economic aspects, to achieve the goal of long term success and the assessment of the adoption potential of their technology.

The full talk is available as an audio webcast (jump to 1h 07min in the webcast), including Q&A after the talk. The slide set is embedded below:

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High-speed Accounting and Cooperative Semantic Caching at the AIMS 2012 Conference

2012-06-19T21:37:46.779Z

The 6^th IFIP International Conference on Autonomous Infrastructure, Management, and Security (AIMS 2012) took place from June 6 to 8 in Luxembourg. SESERV’s coordinator, University of Zurich, was involved in organizing the conference by the participation of Burkhard Stiller (Publication Chair and TPC member) and Martin Waldburger (Ph.D. Student Workshop Co-chair).

The relevance of SESERV’s work on high-speed accounting was reinforced especially by the paper “Hardware Acceleration for Measurements in 100 Gb/s Networks” by Viktor Puš, Czech Republic.

Viktor Puš’s work centered on high-speed hardware support of filtering, metering, and monitoring. This stated clearly that at speeds of above 10 Gbit/s there is no technical solution available, which can run any accounting at all (e.g., at 100 Gbit/s line speed), since existing hardware is barely able to collect all data! As such the relevance of flow-specific or incentive-based per-user traffic management in practical solutions on higher Internet levels cannot supported by now on the backbone of large ISPs.

Andrei Vancea, Ph.D. student at the University of Zurich, presented his paper on “Cooperative Database Caching within Cloud Environments” (co-authored by Guilherme Sperb Machado, Laurent d’Orazio, and Burkhard Stiller) and won one of the two best paper awards at AIMS 2012. Andrei Vancea introduced databases to typically work in such a way that clients ask queries (in SQL), and servers deliver result sets. Leaving this concept, in principle, untouched, the concept of semantic regions is introduced in this work. As an application environment, database caching in clouds are looked at here. More specifically, a cooperative semantic caching mechanism is developed, implemented, and deployed in a cloud environment. The implemented system, called CoopSC – Cooperative Semantic Caching – supports n-dimensional queries, and it employs local and remote query rewriting. It features a distributed index for the organization of semantic regions and queries; an organization unit in the index being called a quad. Regions are indexed in the smallest quads possible. CoopSC addresses the challenge of updates (caching might be confronted with invalid data due to old entries, inconsistencies by combining different snapshots might appear) by means of a dedicated algorithm comparing a specific “before” and “after” parameter.

CoopSC was deployed in a cloud environment and evaluated in two scenarios which differ in whether servers or clients were in the cloud or local. Measurements for response time, amount of data transferred, and payments resulting (for data transfer) were done. Results for the scenario where clients were in the Rackspace cloud and the server was in EmanicsLab show that CoopSC reduces the amount of data transferred considerably and consistently by means of its semantic caching mechanism. With regard to performance though (response time), no significant change was found (even though expected). These results imply the conclusion that Rackspace runs unstable. In the other scenario, using Amazon’s EC2 cloud infrastructure for the server, results with respect to both transferred data (decreased) and response time were positive. Overall conclusions, thus, cover the reduction of data transferred being reduced by cooperative semantic caching, while performance benefits may only be obtained if the cloud provider runs stable.

Draft Recommendation Y.FNsocioeconomic is Now Content-complete

2012-06-18T15:05:41.481Z

The ITU-T Study Group 13 (SG13) on Future networks including mobile and NGN convened in Geneva, Switzerland, from June 4 to 15. University of Zurich (UZH), coordinator of SESERV and editor of the draft Recommendation Y.FNsocioeconomic in Question 21 (Future Networks) has made a contribution to the further development of Y.FNsocioeconomic. Y.FNsocioeconomic is about the socio-economic aware design of Future Network technology. At its heart, Y.FNsocioeconomic presents tussle analysis as a meta-method to anticipate a technology's impact already at technology design time. Tussle analysis consists of three steps:

Identification of stakeholders (step 1)
Identification of tussles among identified stakeholders (step 2)
Determining the anticipated impact and evolution of identified tussles (step 3)

After that the opening of the new Recommendation Y.FNsocioeconomic had been decided in October 2011, and after that the document structure and baseline text for multiple sections had been discussed and approved in February 2012, the submitted contribution for this meeting proposed content for those clauses in Y.FNsocioeconomic that were empty so far, plus a new appendix.

The proposed content addressed three sections in Y.FNsocioeconomic. These three sections make recommendations for suited methods to implement steps 1 to 3 of the tussle analysis methodology. Section 9 recommends methods to implement step 1, the identification of stakeholders. Section 10 recommends methods to implement step 2, the identification of tussles among identified stakeholders. Section 11 recommends methods to implement step 3, which is about determining the anticipated impact and evolution of identified tussles. In addition to content proposed for sections 9 to 11, the contribution proposed a new appendix (appendix II) in order to complement contents of clause 9 by a descriptive outline of stakeholder roles for the case of future Internet technology.

The above figure, thus, outlines the resulting structure of Y.FNsocioeconomic - highlighting the respective sections that introduce the tussle concept, present tussle analysis as the relevant meta-method, and the newly addressed three sections that make recommendations on suited methods to implement steps 1 to 3 of the tussle analysis meta-method. The proposed section contents were discussed in Question 21, and accepted in the Question as well as in the plenary meeting of SG13. This is a key step towards the finalization of Y.FNsocioeconomic. For the first time, all sections are filled with content so that the document's nature and the specific recommendations made become available in full detail. This achievement comes at the right time as the ongoing Study Period will end by 2012. Next steps in developing Y.FNsocioeconomic will happen in the upcoming Study Period, and they will focus on making the draft Recommendation ready for finalization.

Outcome of the Open Platforms for Innovation Session at FIA Aalborg

2012-06-15T13:45:08.220Z

Main Take-aways

The Future Internet is currently addressed by several large R&D programmes in the different regions and related countries. This session was focusing on the EU (Future Internet Public Private Partnership and FIRE) and US (IGNITE and GENI) perspectives, analyzing the differences and complementarities in the approaches, business, challenges and involved stakeholders. The session gathered up to 70 participants in the room, providing the opportunity of a well balanced mix of presentations, discussions and Q/As. The session contributed to develop detailed mutual understanding between the EU and US approaches and identify potential synergies and convergence points. It is anticipated that the discussion will be furthered in the context of the forthcoming TRIDENTCOM conference (11-13.06.12 – Thessaloniki), GENI Engineering Conference - GEC (09-11.07.12 – Boston) and Dublin FIA (February 13 – Dublin).

Session Summary

Rapporteurs/organisers:

Didier Bourse (Alcatel-Lucent, France),

Petra Turkama (Aalto University, Finland),

Serge Fdida (University Pierre et Marie Curie – France).

Session contributors:

Per Blixt (European Commission, Belgium),

Suzanne Iacono (National Science Foundation, USA),

Chip Elliott (GENI Project Office (GPO), USA),

Jose Jimenez (Telefonica I+D, Spain),

Alex Galis (UCL, United Kingdom).

The session was kicked-off by Didier Bourse who explained the context and ambitions of this session, introduced the speakers and highlighted the US and EC approaches for Future Internet research. He then presented specific perspectives to structure the discussion (see slides 11-13/15 of the related presentation), including the layered and using/building approach, the respective programmes features and a set of additional questions (e.g. what would be the value chain, value sustainability and exploitation of the developed platforms and the usage areas applications? What are the detailed KPIs / characteristics / expected outcomes of the platforms, beyond the initial qualification?...).

Petra Turkama and Chip Elliott introduced respectively the FI PPP and IGNITE programmes. Beyond the contractual presentation of the FI PPP, Petra Turkama stressed the first year programme experience in terms of achievements and challenges (see slides 7/8 of the related presentation). The Core Platform (FI-WARE project) and the forthcoming Usage Areas pilots / experimentation (to be developed in the FI PPP Phase 2) are key elements of the FI PPP developments. The session participants were also invited to find out more about the Programme and the upcoming Phase 2 Open Call at www.fi-ppp.eu. Chip Elliott introduced the IGNITE programme that has been recently announced and is under contractualization. He explained in details how US IGNITE leverages current NSF-funding in GENI across U.S. campuses and cities (see slides 7-14/14 of the related presentation).

The panel was then introduced by Serge Fdida and Per Blixt. Chip Elliott and Jose Jimenez introduced respectively the FIRE programme, GENI programme and FI PPP Core Platform (FI-WARE project). Per Blixt highlighted the connection and interdependency between FI PPP and FIRE (complement testing, mid term (FI-PPP) market, long term (FIRE) research) and the next steps in the FIRE developments (see slides 3-5/6 or the related presentation). Chip Elliott provided details on the GENI developments and architecture, and stressed the current 100-200 US campuses expansion (see slides 4-5/6 of the related presentation). Jose Jimenez provided details on the FI PPP Core Platform and Generic Enablers and stressed the challenge of building an open application platform, highlighting that innovation requires much more effort than research (see slide 4-7/8 or the related presentation).

The very interactive and lively panel discussion and Q/As session was targeting answers to the following questions:

(1) Different or common potential innovation channels and innovators?

(2) Different or common (technical) challenges for each of the targeted vertical applications domain?

(3) Different or common enablers for experimentation, pilots and tests beds?

(4) Different or common roles for industry?

(5) Different or common roles for academic / research centers? and

(6) Different or common expected exploitation plans and success factors?

The main discussion points focused on the openness, scalability and sustainability of the developed platforms, the technical/technological enablers for these platforms, the experimental approaches (test beds, pilots, prototypes…) and the architectural perspectives.

The session gathered up to 70+ participants in the room, providing the opportunity of a well balanced mix of presentations, discussions and Q/As. The session contributed to develop detailed mutual understanding between the EU and US approaches and identify potential synergies and convergence points. It is anticipated that the discussion with be furthered in the context of the forthcoming TRIDENTCOM conference (11-13.06.12 – Thessaloniki) GENI Engineering Conference – GEC14 (09-11.07.12 – Boston) and Dublin FIA (February 13 – Dublin). A specific session in the Dublin FIA could be targeted on the FI PPP Core Platform (FI-WARE) use and usage.

Links and Further Information

Outcome of the Novel Networking Session at the FIA Aalborg

2012-06-04T10:11:54.710Z

Main Take-aways

Application/network interconnection is motivated by the observation that network information flows are about to become as important as data information flows. From a business point of view, application/network interconnection based on innovative network designs is expected to result in a win-win situation for all stakeholders. Universal media access with sufficient Quality of Experience (QoE) is expected to be a key incentive in this direction.

Application/Network Interconnection will require a re-consideration of the traditional layered concept as network information flows may become as important as data information flows.
Making applications network-aware through exposure of monitoring information is an efficient and realistic way to optimise their transport over heterogeneous network environments.
From a business point of view, application/network interconnection should (and has selectively been shown already to) result in win-win situations through market equilibria.
Telcos seem reluctant to adopt a bottom-up, application-centric network design for community networks as telcos typically embrace a top-down, general-purpose network design.
Universal Media Access with sufficient Quality-of-Experience (QoE) could be the key incentive for deploying network-assisted service delivery mechanisms

Session Summary

Rapporteurs/organisers:

Markus Fiedler, (Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden & FP7-Euro-NF),

Georgios Gardikis (NCSR "Demokritos", Greece & FP7-ALICANTE),

Martin Waldburger (University of Zurich, Switzerland, FP7-SESERV)

The session was organized in two parts; it opened with brief statement presentations by the five invited panelists, followed by a panel discussion with the involvement of the audience.

Panelist statements

Kurt Tutschku (University of Vienna, FP7-Euro-NF) addressed the problem of finding new ways to interconnect applications and networks, mentioning the example of load balancing mechanisms required for handling high-popularity video streaming. He raised the question whether the whole layering architecture has to be reconsidered to allow information flows between applications and the networks. He stated that network information flows may become as important as data information flows.

Frank den Hartog (TNO, FP7-FIGARO) focused on home networks, which can be more easily managed and monitored so as to allow the deployment of network-aware applications. He argued that making applications network-aware through exposure of monitoring information is an efficient and realistic way to optimise their transport over heterogeneous network environments.

Ioanna Papafili (Athens University of Economics and Business, FP7-SmoothIT) focused on optimization of peer-to-peer traffic via Economic Traffic Management (ETM) approaches. She stated that, from a business point of view, joint application/network optimisation should result in win-win situations through market equilibria. She explained that the envisioned win-win situation was shown for a number of ETM trials in operational networks and real end-users.

Csaba Szabó (Budapest University of Technology and Economics, DIGITAL CITY) addressed specifically telecom operators and their view on network design for the case of community networks. Telecom operators are currently mainly restricted in providing plain connectivity services to customers. They typically adopt a top-down, general-purpose network design, which is possible in principle and might deliver new desirable insights and technologies. However, he states, community networks have proven to be successful if they are designed and built with an application-centric (bottom-up) approach. He anticipates telecom operators to be conservative in adopting a bottom-up network design.

Christian Timmerer (Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt, FP7-ALICANTE) discusses scalable adaptive media delivery systems, especially over HTTP, in which Quality-of-Experience (QoE) is the most critical metric. Universal Media Access with sufficient QoE could be the key incentive for deploying network-assisted service delivery mechanisms.

Discussion

A key issue, as raised by the audience, is how service differentiation and prioritization can be compatible with network neutrality principles. However, while avoiding application degrading, censorship and violation of privacy, some kind of application-aware traffic handling is essential so as to escape from the current “flat” transport paradigm. If we adopt the absolute definition that network neutrality requires the total isolation between the application and networking domains, then this approach is significantly inefficient and certainly counterproductive when it comes to innovation. In any case, many existing architectures in the commercial domain, like Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) cannot be characterized as “neutral” in the strict sense.

Moreover, it was stated that the classic layering approach is not adequate anymore, since the flexibility to adapt to needs is required and that different mechanisms for different types of content are desirable. Programmable flow-based mechanisms such as Openflow are contributing towards fulfilling these requirements. It was furthermore pointed out that cross-domain aspects are extremely important, especially when it comes to Quality-of-Service (QoS) provision and application/network awareness.

Several questions and comments were also directed towards economic aspects. For example, how network intelligence can be paid for and how telecom operators can monetize on novel application/network coupling approaches. Security aspects on payments were raised, along with how revenues could be distributed across several operators in multi-domain communication. It seems that a convincing model has not been found yet, which could push operators to upgrade their infrastructure and adopt new technologies.

Furthermore, the gap between research efforts and commercial deployments was discussed, i.e. the question how research results in this specific field can find their way to the market. Two principles were suggested; first to design mechanisms in an evolutionary manner (non-disruptive) and, second, to start with deployments in restricted environments, such as in home networks or within single domains. It was commented that even old mechanisms, such as IP multicast, while used in single domains, have not survived in multi-domain, Internet-wide scenarios. A sensitive issue for telecom operators is also the degree of exposure of network-aware interfaces, i.e. how much freedom is given to end-users and applications to actually interact with the functionalities of the network.

Last but not least, user experience was once more identified as a key driver towards network innovations. It seems that QoE is a very complex factor, and it sometimes includes aspects beyond service consumption such as the contribution of user-generated content. Many users are willing to pay more, even abandon the flat-rate model, to enjoy a better experience, and this is a need towards which networking innovations and novel business models should converge.

Workshop "Media - A Driver for Future Internet Usage"

2012-04-21T19:20:50.344Z

FI-CONTENT and EXPERIMEDIAprojects are co-organising a workshop "Media - A Driver for Future Internet Usage" during Future Internet Week in Aalborg - Denmark. Wednesday 9 May 9.00-12.30.

Short summary of the workshop: More than 50% (growing) of Internet traffic is now represented by video and audio content. Media applications and services are key drivers for Future Internet infrastructures capabilities. Through this workshop, we propose to build on early results achieved by the FI-CONTENT and EXPERIMEDIA projects. Several potential testbeds will be presented opening the conversation: how testbeds can support pilots, with special consideration to challenges such as user partisipation and architecture/integration approaches allowing the introduction of innovative technologies (generic and specific enablers).

Registration is now open on the FIA website. Please note that the charge for attendance of the Workshop is included in the Future Internet Week registration charge.

More information visit EXPERIMEDIA

Tussle Analysis Goes to East Africa

2012-04-19T11:02:58.550Z

The Study Group 13 (SG13) of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) organized a 1-day workshop on “Developments regarding telecommunication network architectures and services” in Kampala, Uganda, on April 2, 2012. The event was hosted by the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC). This workshop was intended to bridge the standardization gap between developing and developed countries, aiming to increase awareness among participants from countries which usually do not participate in SG13 meetings. The workshop brought together 27 participants representing operators (primarily) based in East and Central Africa, regulators, standardization bodies, network equipment manufacturers, and academia. SESERV's efforts in developing tussle analysis as a means to support and assess the socio-economic aware design of future network technology are brought into SG13's standardization activities by the University of Zurich (coordinator of SESERV, academic member of the ITU). Work on the according draft Recommendation Y.FNsocioeconomic is ongoing. Martin Waldburger participated in this workshop to give an outline of tussle analysis and the specific work in Y.FNsocioeconomic.

With the outlined workshop theme and objective in mind, the event was structured into three sessions.

Session 1: IMT & IMS: Developments and Impacts on NGN and Future Networks

3GPP – The Home of LTE Standards Development. Dr. Asok Chatterjee, Ericsson USA  [Biography]

Current status of IMT/IMS deployment strategies and future developments. Ms. Tengetile Nhlengethwa, Ericsson Sub Saharan Africa [Biography]

IP Multimedia System: general aspects and migration perspectives. Dr. Leo Lehmann, OFCOM Switzerland [Presentation | Biography]

Main Take Aways from Session 1

LTE is an evolution path. It’s up to operators to make a decision if and when LTE is adopted.
LTE and LTE-Advanced are not the end, but part of a process.
Additional spectrum allocation is required (WRC 2015)
IMS has left the trial stage.
IMS deployment is to be phased to allow integration and testing in a step-wise method.
Agreement on scope with customer is crucial. Work together with customer during deployment (knowledge transfer).

Session 2: Cloud Computing Standardization and Future Networks

Cloud computing perspective and standardization. Dr. Jamil Chawki, France Telecom Orange  [Presentation | Biography]

Socio economic aware design of future network technology (Y.FNsocioeconomic). Dr. Martin Waldburger, University Zurich Switzerland  [Biography]

Main Take Aways from Session 2

Major cloud standardization areas have been identified in the ITU’s respective focus group.
Relevant cloud layers embrace the access, services, resources, and networks.
Virtualization is a key issue.
For Future Networks (FN):

Be aware of the socio-economic aspects of technology. Technology does not succeed by itself, but by its use.
Consider socio-economics in technology design.
Tussle analysis is an appropriate method.

Session 3: The African View on NGN

Status of Implementation of IMS/IMT, the UTL Perspective. Richard Adongu, David Ocira Oyaro, UTL Uganda [Presentation | Biography: Adongu | Biography: Oyaro]

Main Take Aways from Session 3

Uganda Telecom (UTL) considers IMS deployment from 2013 onwards.
Issues regarding replacement of legacy network/services exist.
Operator challenges for vendors to take up: Limited knowledge and skills, financial issues.
Market might not be ready for changes.
Fast technology changes may render operators unable to churn networks at a matching rate.

One Year of Standardization Activities within the ITU-T

2012-03-12T14:50:31.750Z

Over the last year SESERV was actively contributing to ITU-T Study Group 13 (Future Networks) meetings. These efforts now resulted in the first draft of a future ITU-T Recommendation entitled "Socio-Economic Aware Design of Future Network Technology" (Y.FNsocioeconomic) and a Question Description proposal for the next Study Period with a dedicated socio-economic focus (entitled "Social and economic awareness properties of FNs") being approved as formal meeting outputs of Study Group 13's plenary meeting on Feb 17, 2012. In addition to these two items, that were substantially supported by SESERV experts, a closer interaction between ITU-T's technically oriented Study Group 13 and ITU-T's economically oriented Study Group 3 was initiated and supported by SESERV. This resulted in two liaison statements between these groups being approved. SESERV's successful ITU-T activities may be partitioned into these three fields (ITU-T Recommendation/Y.FNsocioeconomic, Question Description, Liaison Statement) and summarized as follows:

• Y.FNsocioeconomic: SESERV’s active contributions (through members of the University of Zurich, UZH) to the development of the future ITU-T Recommendation entitled "Socio-Economic Aware Design of Future Network Technology" resulted in a formal meeting output approved at the Study Group 13's plenary meeting. This is a considerable step forward in the development of this future Recommendation. Also it implies chances of the tussle analysis, discussed in this document, becoming an ITU-T Recommendation eventually. Substantial support in the Study Group 13 is seen towards this target.

• Question Description: The study period for Question 21 and Study Group 13 is going to end in next year. Question 21 is going to propose 5 new Questions to be built – one of which is termed 'Social and economic awareness properties of FNs' (FN = Future Network) and covers input from SESERV. SESERV as well as FISE are both explicitly mentioned as bodies of interest to the ITU to liaise with and the fact that this Question Description is going to be proposed shows support within Question 21 and it documents SESERV’s impact.

• Liaison statement: With the progress in Y.FNsocioeconomic, a second liaison statement is sent out to Study Group 3 which deals with economic questions (e.g., network externalities and pricing). This follow-up statement and the positive, albeit short reaction to the first liaisons statement is seen as an indicator for SESERV’s success in bringing together technically oriented (SG13) and economically oriented (SG3) FN experts.

SESERV will continue to work on Y.FNsocioeconomic and compile a contribution for the next Study Group 13 meeting in June.

7th GI/ITG KuVS Workshop on Future Internet

2012-02-15T17:36:32.063Z

On January 27, 2012, Fabio Hecht, from the University of Zurich, a member of the SESERV project, attended the 7th GI/ITG KuVS Workshop on Future Internet, which took place at the Nokia-Siemens headquarters in Munich, Germany. UZH has submitted an extended abstract entitled “LiveShift: A Time-Shifted Video Streaming Approach”, which was accepted for presentation. Presentations targeted the general theme of Future Internet and were diverse in terms of specific areas; most had, though, a technical, rather than an economic point of view. While some presentations envisioned a clean-slate approach that grants authors more freedom to create solutions to current and future Internet issues, some participants are skeptical to whether a complete change in the current Internet is possible, taking into consideration, for example, the slow adoption of IPv6. The points at which most authors and participants agree is that the Future Internet will be increasingly distributed in terms of resources and service providers. Therefore, several presentations targeted the use of such distributed resources more efficiently, or ways to select among several protocols or service providers in an optimal way. More specific information, including specific talks, authors, abstracts, and slide presentations, can be found at http://www.future-internet.org/2011/7_Fachgespraech/archiv_2011_KuVS7.shtml.en

Methods to Achieve Socio-economic Design Goals

2012-01-31T09:41:09.414Z

SESERV is actively contributing (through members of the University of Zurich, UZH) to the development of the future ITU-T Recommendation entitled "Methods to Achieve Socio-Economic Design Goals and Objectives for Future Networks" (working title: Y.FNsocioeconomic) as reported and introduced earlier. Y.FNsocioeconomic is in an early state currently. Its scope has been defined and a rough document structure was sketched. Accordingly, UZH has submitted a contribution for the upcoming NGN-GSI event of the ITU-T in early February 2012. The contribution makes two proposals which will be discussed at the meeting:

A more detailed document structure
Contents for multiple sections

The first contribution is important for a positioning of the tussle analysis method developed within SESERV. The proposed document structure aims to present tussle analysis as a meta-method to approach socio-economic questions of Future Network technology in a structured manner. Tussle analysis consists of three main steps - stakeholder identification, tussle identification, tussle evolution and impact. The proposed document structure, hence, looks at different methods that might be suited to implement each or some of the three tussle analysis steps. These methods range from interviews (well suited for the first step), to role playing simulation (well suited for the second step) to System Dynamics (well suited for the third step), to name a few examples.

The second contribution proposes contents primarily in those sections that describe tussle analysis. The design for tussle principle (as introduced by Clark in 2005) is taken as a starting point from which SESERV developed tussle analysis in consideration of the technology development cycle. In late January, a presentation on the SESERV-driven contribution has been given to the TTC (Telecommunication Technology Committee), a Japanese standardization body. The presentation outlines contributions made, and it provides insight into tussle analysis.

ITU-T Study Group 3 Meeting

2012-01-18T15:43:20.313Z

On January 17, 2012, members of the Swiss delegation, being at the same time from the SESERV project, Martin Waldburger and Patrick Poullie attended the ITU-T Study Group 3 meeting in Geneva to observe and support reactions to Study Group 13’s liaisons statement. In reaction to a SESERV-driven contribution to the SG13 meeting in October 2011, SG13 had opened a new work item called Y.FNsocioeconomic. Y.FNsocioeconomic is a recommendation to develop a methodology to analyse social and economic requirements for networks, and make them technical requirements for Future Networks. The liaisons statement informs SG3 about Y.FNsocioeconomic and requests SG3, which is focused on economics, for qualified comments and feedback on economic questions that arise in the context of it.

Even without interaction of the Swiss delegation members present or a deadline of Y.FNsocioeconomic being mentioned in the liaisons statement, SG3 agreed to work on a response draft to be sent to SG13, in particular, the US Administration and vice-chairman (Abossé Akue-Kpakpo, Togo) volunteered to work on this matter.

SG3’s reaction to the liaisons statement is seen as an indicator for SESERV’s success in bringing together technically oriented (SG13) and economically oriented (SG3) Internet experts. Furthermore, SG3’s reaction is another important step to bring methodology developed by SESERV into practical standardization and application.

Future Internet Reference Architecture Group: Towards architectural design principles and a reference architecture for the Future Internet

2012-01-16T18:03:36.204Z

The main objective of Future Internet Architecture (FIArch) group activity is to define a common set of architectural design principles and a reference architecture of the Future Internet that can guide and unify key technology developments in the future. This activity aims to describe the FI Design Principles. “Design principles” suggest agreed structural & behavioural rules on how a designer/an architect can best structure the various architectural components and describe the fundamental and time invariant laws underlying the working of an engineered artifact. The outcomes of this activity will be reported in a white paper to be soon publicly available.

SESERV has proposed two new design principles that address FI architecture requirements as they are described in Fundamental Limitations of the current Internet and the path to Future Internet, EC, FIArch Group, 2011 (http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/ activities/foi/library/docs/current-internet-limitations-v9.pdf) and has participated in a workshop and a physical meetings and several tele-conferences to support this proposal. In particular, SESERV participated in:

an open workshop that was organized on May 23, 2011 in Brussels, where all contributors were asked to present their proposed design principles and defend their contributions, and
a face-to-face meeting that was organized on September 23, 2011 in Brussels to decide on the design principles to be included in the FIArch document.

FIArch open workshop on FI Design principles, May 23, 2011

More than 40 experts from industry and academy participated in the meeting. The agenda of the workshop may be found in the following site: http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/foi/events/fiarch‐23052011/index_en.htm

Contributions and presentations are also uploaded there.

The major highlights of the workshop are the following:

a) There was a strong interest of most participants on the FIArch group work and would like to actively participate to the group

b) A number of very interesting and diversing opinions on the FI Design Principles have been contributed, presented and discussed/debated in the workshop.

c) The next step for FIArch group will be to analyse them from a technical and socio‐economic point of view and conclude to the most important ones that receive the maximum consensus.

F2F FIArch meeting on FI Design principles, September 23, 2011

The f2f FIArch meeting was dominated by the following topics:

finalization of definitions and description of current Internet design principles,
identification of the design principles that need to be preserved in the FI,
presentation of newly proposed design principles, and
wrap-up of the work done this far, open issues, action points and next steps planning.

Dimitri Papadimitriou (Alcatel Lucent) and Theodore Zahariadis (Synelixis) were the moderators of the meeting, who also co-edit the white paper to be the outcome of this activity. Also, participants from EU projects NextMedia, IOT-I, SOFI, EFFECTS+, EIFFEL, Chorus+ and Paradiso 2 attended the discussions of the meeting.

Initially, the focus was on the definition of terms such as design principle, data, service, architecture, communication, communication end-point, etc. Additionally, a great deal of discussion took place on the existing design principles that need to be preserved/omitted/changed/augmented to successfully address the requirements of the FI architecture. Then, the focus moved to the newly proposed principles; representatives from various EU projects presented their proposals and provided justification and arguments to support them.

Remained open issues were later addressed in off-line discussions (via email) between the participants and their work groups.

8th Future Networks Concertation Meeting - Workshop on "Building the Cloud: Management, Performance and Interoperability”

2012-01-08T21:55:53.104Z

The 8^th Future Networks Concertation Meeting aimed at bringing together researchers of several projects to describe their recent developments on cloud interoperability and management and key challenges ahead. The Workshop on "Building the Cloud: Management, Performance and Interoperability” was structured in threesessions, each one containing a set of presentations followed by a brainstorming discussion on identifying key challenges and ways to deal with such issues. The detailed programme and presentations can be found at http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/events/cf/fnc8/document.cfm?doc_id=18621.

Cloud Interoperability session

Benoit Tremblay (Ericsson) introduced the purpose and scope of the Cloud Interoperability session; that is to advance our understanding on the interoperability challenges and candidate approaches followed by several projects. He noted that many application types (such as gaming) are offered on the Internet through many cloud providers (like amazon, rackspace, etc.), but interoperability is hampered due to the multitude interfaces used by each operator. Candidate approaches for moving from isolated to interoperable cloud services were suggested to be standardized interfaces and Cloud federation; where the difference lies in the number of providers an end-user interacts with. However, common interfaces are necessary in both cases.

Azimeh Sefidcon, from SAIL FP7 project, started by describing their approach to Cloud Networking, named CloNe. In their architecture, both peering and hierarchical (related to federation) delegation of requests is possible. Then, she mentioned a set of challenges. In particular, ISPs don’t reveal network topology information. This makes difficult the optimal placement of Virtual Machines in different domains. Another challenge is the Information hiding from network operators to application providers.

The “cloud curtain” issue (no visibility) was also raised by Sergi Figuerola from GEYSERS FP7 project, suggesting that well-defined architecture & business models are needed in order to have an impact on market and even force “hyper-giant” cloud providers to make use of open technologies. But the main problem in achieving cloud interoperability, as was identified during the panel discussion, is that large operators (Google, Amazon) don’t care about interoperability. This is also evident from the fact that integrators (brokers) are the driving force for standardization. However, interoperability is known to help in achieving a competitive landscape in an efficient manner.

Another dimension of problems pointed out during the panel discussion is related to interoperation with network operators. Network QoS guarantees are not prevalent today and even when an ISP offers such SLAs, monitoring is necessary in order to identify the cause when something goes wrong.

Cloud Management session

Alex Galis, representing AUTOI + RESERVOIR research projects, highlighted the importance of management software in three types of shared infrastructures (network clouds, computing clouds and integrated clouds, or software-defined networks) and mentioned that similar challenges exist in all three cases (e.g. QoS management and autonomic operations).

Similarly, Laurent Ciavaglia from UNIVERSELF research project posed the question whether there are new, additional, or significantly changed requirements specific to cloud computing and/or cloud networking. It seems that there are many similarities when dealing with the management or other performance-related objectives (such as stability, scalability) of cloud and networking resources.

However, the complexity is greater when these resources are combined. For example, Ciully from GEYSERS mentioned the need for cross-layer optimizations, such as when computing an end-to-end path subject to IT constraints, which in turn creates the need for a Cloud-to-network interface.

Marcelo Yannuzzi, representing ONE research project, argued that Cloud computing will have dramatic effects on networking (e.g. Google is said to be working on a carrier-grade router for 6000 euros). Furthermore, he suggested that better coordination is needed between network & IT management systems, instead of integration.

One example of such type of coordination was described by Panagiotis Demestichas from OneFIT, where an ISP can form an opportunistic network across multiple Access Points in order to meet the increased bandwidth demand of the users/ applications in a particular area.

Nicolas Le Sauze, from ETICS, suggested that human intervention is important and not everything can be automated. Furthermore, there is a tradeoff between scalability & dynamicity. Another challenge regarding cloud management (network + IT) has been mentioned, which is neutrality when an infrastructure provider collaborates (and at the same time competes at the retail level) with a virtual operator.