Scalable and Adaptive Internet Solutions (SAIL)

25 Partners: A strong industry-led consortium of leading operators, vendors and research institutions

Leading telecommunication operators, vendors, and research institutions collaborate in a strong, industry-led consortium to develop the Networks of the Future. A consortium of 25 operators, vendors and research institutions started on August 1st, 2010, the large EU-funded research project SAIL (Scalable & Adaptive Internet Solutions) aiming at designing architectures for the Networks of the Future, as part of the European Commission’s 7th Framework Program. Continue reading »

Press release: Future Media Distribution using Information Centric Networks

(A PDF version of the press release is available here)

  • EU-funded project SAIL has developed mechanisms and protocols for Information Centric Networks (ICN) that help to manage the heavy workload of transferring media information more efficiently than today’s networks.
  • EFRAIM and other research projects will benefit from this work and continue to further detail the future solutions for media distribution – their business models and customer satisfaction are two key elements of these solutions.
  • SAIL has been part of the creation of the ICN Research Group (ICN-RG) within the research part of the standards organization IETF, as ICN is close to possible first deployment.

How will users access media in the future? And what factors will affect the performance of media distribution?
The EU-funded project SAIL, Scalable and Adaptive Internet Solutions, has helped to evolve the current network to better fit tomorrow’s needs. The project is led by Ericsson, and involves 25 leading telecommunications players from Europe, Australia and Israel. It is funded by the European Commission’s seventh framework program (FP7), started in August 2010, and ends February 2013.
Users accessing information and applications are mobile and they expect their computing environment to follow them. The project solutions will ensure that the user’s favorite applications are responsive and perceived as being available at “arm’s length” – no matter where they are in the world. The NetInf system for Information Centric Networking has been used in SAIL as a research platform to enable users to address content directly, rather than addressing servers to get the closest copy. This is being demonstrated at the event ‘Future Media Distribution using Information Centric Networks’ in Stockholm 13th February.
SAIL has also presented Cloud Networking as a concept to automatically establish and manage distributed cloud resources (computation, storage and networking) within and across providers’ domains, making it possible for operators to be part of interconnected clouds across the internet.
SAIL partners have been involved in the creation of the ICN Research Group (ICN-RG). ICNRG is part of the Internet Research Task Force, IRTF which is a parallel organization to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), that develops and promotes Internet standards.
EFRAIM is a national Swedish project, funded by VINNOVA, Sweden’s innovation agency. The purpose of the project is to identify and develop distributed network solutions for media distribution. The solutions should be robust, scalable, cost efficient and above all energy efficient. The consortium includes content owners, producers, distributors, vendors, operators and researchers. The mix of partners in the project will ensure that the identified solutions will be technically relevant and commercially attractive.
Existing and newly-developed solutions will be analyzed in detail regarding total energy consumption for the media delivery, user behaviors and experienced quality.
Partners, SAIL:
Ericsson (Sweden), Alcatel-Lucent (Germany), Nokia Siemens Networks (Finland), NEC Europe (Germany), France Telecom (France), Telefónica Research and Development (Spain), Telecom Italia (Italy), Portugal Telecom Inovação, (Portugal), SICS (Sweden), IST-UTL (Portugal), University of Paderborn (Germany), Aalto University (Finland), KTH (Sweden), Fraunhofer AISEC (Germany), University of Bremen, (Germany), Hewlett-Packard (UK), Fundacion Robotiker (Spain), Institut Telecom (France), Technion, (Israel), DOCOMO Eurolabs (Germany), Inria (France), Trinity College Dublin (Ireland), NICTA (Australia), Universidad de Cantabria (Spain), Lyatiss (France).

Partners, EFRAIM:
Acreo, SICS, LTH, Ericsson, SVT, TV4, TeliaSonera, Spotify, Qbrick and Peerialism. (All from Sweden).

For further information, please contact:
Project websites:
SAIL: www.sail-project.eu
EFRAIM: www.acreo.se/efraim
Contacts:
SAIL Project Manager: Thomas Edwall (Ericsson), phone: +46 10 719 6310
EFRAIM Project Manager: Andreas Aurelius (Acrea, Swedish ICT AB), phone: +46 8 632 7802

Three new deliverables from SAIL available online

Three new deliverables from SAIL have been made available in the list of deliverables:

D.A.8: Evaluation of business models
Abstract: Due to the growing traffic volume in the Internet, new technical solutions are being developed. The three SAIL technologies, i.e. Network of Information (NetInf), Open Connectivity Services (OConS) and Cloud Networking (CloNe), aim at improving the scalability and performance of the Internet, as well as to increase the quality of experience for end users. The changing technical structure also changes the industry and market structure. This document aims at discussing the business and regulatory potential of the three SAIL technologies. After the market and ecosystem overview and the stakeholder analysis, potential business models for each of the technologies are proposed. The value of this work is the set of recommendations for technical development of each technology, which were based on the analysis reported in this work.

D.B.3: Final NetInf Architecture
Abstract: This deliverable on the “Final NetInf Architecture” provides an update on the NetInf architecture that resulted from recent prototyping and evaluation activities in the SAIL project. Based on experiences from prototyping individual components, interoperability tests, integration into systems and scalability and performance evaluations as well as  community feedback, the NetInf architecture has been advanced. In addition, more aspects of the systems such as specific Convergence Layers and routing mechanisms have been developed and specified.

D.D.3: Refined Architecture
Abstract: This document describes the final cloud networking architecture proposed by SAIL work package D. Cloud networking aims at providing on-demand elastic network services to connect existing data centre based cloud infrastructures across wide area networks. In order to achieve that we propose the  flash network slice, a network resource that can be provisioned and reconfi gured in a timeframe that is compatible with current provisioning of virtual machines in a data centre.
We consider a multi-provider scenario, where network and data centre providers must cooperate to implement global virtual infrastructures. This is enabled through provisioning  interfaces and inter-provider protocols defi ned in the present architecture. The architecture introduces a layering of functions, interfaces and interactions within single cloud network operators, across cloud network operators, and with cloud network customers to implement complete end-to-end services. Management algorithms for user goal translation, fault and resource management are presented, including results from practical experimentation and simulations. Security goals and policy based access control mechanisms are described. This final version of the cloud networking architecture represents a refi nement over the initial architecture after experience gained in prototyping and simulating management and security functions and the implementation of a complete integrated multi-data centre, multi-operator cloud networking eco-system.

 

New deliverable available: Description of Implemented Prototype

A new public deliverable is available, which you can find among the other published deliverables in the list of deliverables:

D-D.2: Description of Implemented Prototype

Abstract:
This document describes the implementation of the Cloud Network (CloNe) prototyping. Cloud networking in the context of SAIL focuses on the integrated provisioning of network resources connected to data centre resources on-demand. As such, existing data  centre-based Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) can be interconnected through the wide area network using a network service model. At the core of the solution resides a distributed control plane which binds resources together and thus creates full virtual infrastructures. A new network service interface that fits the needs of cloud computing has been designed and implemented. This document presents the tools utilized in prototyping, extensions performed to existing tools, components that were implemented from scratch, as well as how those components were integrated into a system.

Two deliverables describing SAIL prototyping plans available now

During the summer, SAIL submitted two interesting deliverables to the Commission. These two public reports from the SAIL project are now available from the list of deliverables.

D-A.9: Description of Overall Prototyping Use Cases, Scenarios and Integration Points

Abstract:
This document presents the overall prototyping scenarios, use cases and integration points in the SAIL project.  Three prototyping scenarios derived from the project overall use cases de fined in D.A.1 are described: Event with Large Crowd, Dynamic Enterprise and Elastic NetInf Deployment. These scenarios integrate the work from the di fferent technical work packages NetInf, OConS and CloNe.  An overview on how the prototype components will be integrated and some means to achieve the integration is also documented.

D-C.3: Demonstrator Specification and Integration Plan

Abstract:
This document is a public deliverable of the EU-FP7 project SAIL (Scalable Adaptive Internet Solutions ) and describes the demonstrator activities and prototype integration plan for the SAIL workpackage ‘Open Connectivity Service (OConS)’ with the target of final realization at project end. Moreover, details of cross-WP cooperation are given from an OConS perspective in addition to the project-wide description in the related deliverable D.A.9 “Description of overall prototyping use cases, scenarios and integration points”.

ICN-2012, Friday, Aug 17

This week, the ACM SIGCOMM 2012 Conference is held in Helsinki, Finland and on Friday, August 17, the SAIL co-organised second ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Information-Centric Networking (ICN-2012) will take place.

Two out of three Technical Program Chairs are SAIL participants, namely Dirk Kutscher (NEC Laboratories Europe – Germany) and Börje Ohlman (Ericsson – Sweden).

In Session 3: Forwarding and Caching (Friday 14:00-15:30), the SAIL paper On the Effects of Caching in Access Aggregation Networks, John Ardelius, Björn Grönvall (SICS), Lars Westberg, Åke Arvidsson (EAB), will be presented.

“NetInf Content Delivery and Operations” deliverable available

The document NetInf Content Delivery and Operations, a public deliverable from the SAIL project, is now available from the list of deliverables.

Abstract of the report:

This deliverable on “NetInf Content Delivery and Operations” reports on the results of the NetInf
development work on content delivery, applications, and operations/management. It describes
the NetInf Protocol and key components of the NetInf architecture such as an object model,
a naming scheme, the NetInf Convergence Layer approach and several specific NetInf Convergence
Layers that have been developed. This document also presents the NetInf approach to
global connectivity and discusses operational considerations for the NetInf technology in specific
deployments. It also provides an evaluation of several mechanisms for transport, caching and
management and a conceptual description of service placement in NetInf networks, together with
a service placement optimization approach. The NetInf “Event with Large Crowd” demonstration
scenario integrates the different technology components and corresponding SAIL partner
developments and provides a basis for evaluation.

Open Source NetInf software – new version released

SAIL has released a new version of its open source NetInf (Network of Information) software.

The package consists of different implementations of name-content binding validation algorithms for the NI URI format that SAIL members published earlier (see SAIL list of publications) and additional protocol and NetInf router/client implementations.

Recent changes include the implementation of new features of the NI URI format, including: truncated hash suites, a binary name format, and a human-readable format.

The package provides implementations in different languages, including C, Clojure, Java, PHP, Python, and Ruby. There are also additional tools such as patches to curl and wget and shells scripts for web server support.

The software is available at https://sourceforge.net/projects/netinf/ and is licensed under Apache-2.0.

Sixth quarterly newsletter from SAIL

The sixth quarterly newsletter from SAIL is now available. You can download the newsletter here (link).

In the newsletter you will find an overview of the achievements and activities within the SAIL project during the last quarter. In the “under the spotlight” section in this issue we highlight the upcoming SAIL Summer School in June this year.

You can subscribe to the quarterly newsletters from SAIL by entering your email address in the form below.

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Information-Centric Networking Research Group (ICNRG)

A new IRTF research group on Information-Centric Networking (ICNRG) has been chartered.

The distribution and management of named information is already today a major application in the Internet. Information-centric networking (ICN) is an approach to evolve the Internet infrastructure to directly support this use by introducing uniquely named data as a core Internet principle.

SAIL is already actively involved in ICN research, especially within the work package dealing with Network of Information (NetInf).

Dirk Kutscher (NEC) and Börje Ohlman (Ericsson) from SAIL will co-chair the ICNRG together with Dave Oran (Cisco).

The research group will provide a forum for the exchange and analysis of ICN research ideas and proposals, and the main objective of the ICNRG is to couple ongoing ICN research with solutions that are relevant for evolving the Internet at large. The ICNRG will provide an excellent platform for disseminating SAIL results on ICN.

Charter and participation information can be found at http://irtf.org/icnrg.