Sailor's Inn

I attended my second Concertation meeting as coordinator of SAIL last week. Already, when networking with my new-found peers in the EC ICT community, it is starting to feel natural to discuss in abstract terms around ‘strategic research agendas’ and ‘bridging between Research and Standardization’. (Wonder whether that is a good sign…)

Hmm, “concertation” you might say, what is that? Well, “co-ordination gathering” gives the same meaning and in my view in more straight forward words. This example of choice of wording though got me reflecting over how easy and unnoticed many of us adapt the jargon of certain communities we are interacting in. And even more how it effectively it may pull the curtain down for outsiders who possibly could have had an interest in taking part of what you are doing!

My point of the day being that in order for a large research project like SAIL to be successful in spreading our results and gain adoption of our innovations, we may never allow ourselves to take the “easy path” and start to limit ourselves by only talking about our work in fluffy wordings with unclear underlying meaning. What do for instance ‘Service Diversity’, ‘Functional flexibility’ and ‘Virtualization of resources’ mean to people outside of the (rather closed) ICT research arena? What does it mean to people on the industry side? What does it mean to intended consumers on the street?

By choosing a slightly more demanding path though, we will in the SAIL project secure that in whatever work we do, and whatever result we disclose, we refer to it in a context that shall be easy to relate to for a broader audience. I.e. that makes sense to everyday people with an interest in our industry! I see that our framework for doing this is our deliverable on Scenarios and Use-Cases, outlining in which – sometimes deliberately stretched – situations that we envision our technologies will be used in.

We are for sure not unique in the FP-community in describing use-cases for our foreseen work – it is seen from many of our related projects visible here at the Concertation (e.g. Medieval and UniverSelf). Where we though intend to make a difference is in the way we will use this document throughout our project – re-assuring that we do not fall into the trap of the “easy path”, by always having a tie between the languages prevailing within respective communities that we are interacting with – being it Academia, Industry, EU or the ‘Consumers on the street’.

As said initially, it is very easy to choose the “easy path” once you have the option, therefore I need you to watch over me and to alarm me once you see me or any of my colleagues in the project diverging!

Disclosure and disclaimer: I am engaged in the SAIL project, on behalf of Ericsson. However the opinions expressed in this post are my personal, and not those of the SAIL project or my employer.

As SAIL representative, I am present at the Future Networks 7^th Concertation meeting of the FP7 which was hold in EU commission facilities in Brussels on February 10^th and 11^th. The first morning session of the plenary focused on standardisation and how the EU research project can have an impact and anchor their results in the standardisation bodies. Many of the standard development organisations (SDO) were mentioned (ITU, IEEE, IETF, ETSI, ITU, 3GPP) and experience from many research projects in those SDO were reported.  Two issues have retained my attention: long standardisation process and using the number of standard contributions as a measure of the success of a research project.

The time required to go from new ideas introduction up to standard approval has been raised as an issue in many reports.  The total time elapsed for the end to end standardisation process exceeds the duration of most EU-projects. Nevertheless, research projects efforts in SDO are not useless.  Even if the process is not completed during the scope of the project, this effort can be use to open minds to new ideas and trace the path for succeeding projects or the industrial partners to takeover and bring the research results to the market.  I believe that in the case of the SAIL project, we should build on the work that was done in ancestor and other ongoing projects such as 4WARD.

Regarding the number of standard contributions as a measure of the success of a project, I believe that it is not enough to push our results in the standardisation bodies, but it is crucial that we get the support from the industry to bring the results to the market.  To succeed in bringing results to the market, a tight collaboration between academia, equipment vendors, operators and applications providers is vital to ensure that we provide the right solution to the right problem and that this solution can be implemented in a reasonable way.  SAIL consortium provides this end to end view but still has to work with other Future Networks established players.

As a conclusion, I want to emphasize the necessity of the standardisation as a mean of disseminating what we achieved in SAIL, as a continuation of the work initiated by other closely related research work and also to pave the way to the industrialisation of our results.  With the strong consortium put in place for the SAIL projects, we have excellent conditions to bring this mission to success.

Disclosure and disclaimer: I am engaged in the SAIL project, on behalf of Ericsson. However the opinions expressed in this post are my personal, and not those of the SAIL project or my employer.

Communication (do not mistake with “communications”) became more and more important in the last years, i.e., the need to tell the others what we are doing is a must these days.  In a time lapse of a generation, we went from paper information in libraries to electronic media in the Internet, with all the consequences that it has (easiness of access, amount of information, the way we show things, etc.).  R&D cannot ignore these aspects, and research projects are requested more and more to use these new means to communicate their progress and findings.

SAIL, dealing with the Future Internet and the Networks of the Future, would obviously had to follow this stream.  As in any other project within the European framework Dissemination and Exploitation plays an important role, and an initial Deliverable (D.A.5) has been produced for this area.  The approach was to combine the more traditional means (e.g., papers in conferences and presence in workshops) with these new approaches (this blog itself is already part of this strategy).  The report, Exploitation and Dissemination Plan, is available in the project’s website, under the entry for Deliverables.  Hopefully, this way, we’ll be capable of better communicating the project’s objectives, progress and results to the whole research community, hence, not only reaching one of the goals of the European Commission, but also sharing the knowledge with colleagues, for a better and faster progress of Science.

Do join us on this blog, sharing your comments and views.  I’m sure we’ll all benefit from this.

Disclosure and disclaimer: I am engaged in the SAIL project, on behalf of IST-TUL. However the opinions expressed in this post are my personal, and not those of the SAIL project or my employer.

As part of the Future Internet week in Ghent I’m attending the one-day event organised by the Future Internet Research and Experimentation – FIRE – Initiative,

The Auditorium, where the FIRE event is taking place is really an impressive place; the whole congress centre is nice. Opening session is about the programme as such. The main complaint they seem to have is that they still need to convince users. IBBT gave their view  on experimental research on social and economic challenges; they are interdisciplinary and user driven with a time-frame from 5 to 1 years. They base on three pilars: open innovation, technological infrastructure and usability. They have a big infrastructure with 100′s of nodes both wireless and wired.  Then, the 7 flagship initiatives for the Commission were presented. The objective is bringing research results quicker to market, moving towards an Internet enabled service economy. FIRE is regarding time to market and technological risk between FP7 and the FI-PPP. A short term overview of the ICT WP for 2011&2012  was given and FIRE was cited as the main tool for experimentation driven R&D. Finally, a presentarion on FIRE itself was given from FIREstation representatives. They cordinate the different FIRE activities. As such, they announced an info-day on the 9th of Feb. 2011 for the different calls for proposals emerging from the projects. Focus on proposals that extend the FIRE session infrastructure.

The second session featured seven different FIRE projects, their goals in a nutshell and how they think they can convince users to use their facilities. Lots of information packed in an 8 minute/project format, maybe too much.

1. EADS plans to use the CREW infrastructure for their development cycle.
2. The approach of the SmartSantander project was presented.
3. TEFIS presented their approach on lowering the entry barriers
4. OneLab showed what they have up&running
5. BonFIRE spoke about their approach to capture user requirements for multi-cloud Internet of Things environment.
6. ngn2fi was showcased by Fokus
7. OFELIA spoke about their OpenFlow infrastructure as an approach and that they hope that that the OpneFlow API might attract more users around the world than something developed from scratch.

The third session was about projects and their users and I had to leave in order to give my talk on SAIL @ the EURO-NF NoE meeting. More information on FIRE use cases can be found here.

Disclosure and disclaimer: I am engaged in SAIL, a project around the future internet on behalf of Telefónica I+D. However the opinions expressed in this post are my personal, and not those of the SAIL project or my employer.

The first issue of the SAIL Newsletter is now available, and you can get it in PDF by following this link.

The SAIL Newsletter is a quarterly newsletter that aims at providing everyone with information about the work being developed in the SAIL Project. This way we can the share the progress made, get some feedback from interested parties, and also, of course, get some attention to our work.

In this first issue, the spotlight is given to the Network of Information work package, looking at the ideas that are being considered and developed:

The work package is investigating how ICN concepts, such as name-based routing, receiver-oriented transport, and ubiquitous caching can be employed as cornerstones for a future network architecture

You can subscribe the SAIL Newsletter by inserting you email in the subscription page in SAIL Project website.

Disclosure and disclaimer: I am engaged in the SAIL project, on behalf of IST-TUL. However the opinions expressed in this post are my personal, and not those of the SAIL project or my employer.

Any WordPress-gurus out there?

Sometimes you find yourself stuck on a simple task, and spend time trying to resolve an issue that you didn’t expect. Today was such a day…

SAIL is about to publish the first quarterly newsletter. It shall of course be featured on the main site of the SAIL project. At the same time we should offer the possibility to subscribe to the SAIL newsletter, in a  similar way as you can subscribe to blog post here on Sailors Inn.

All in all I expected this to be straight forward, using WordPress categories on the site and Feedburner to “burn” the category feed. However a problem occurred. I have posted a description of the issue on the WordPress forum if you are interested and might be able to help. It involves a modification of “the loop” in WordPress. I am not sure how the feeds are generated by WordPress, but it seems like “the loop” is involved.

If I don’t find a solution during Monday we’ll go for a slightly different approach – so stay tuned for the newsletter!

Any ideas around the issue?

Update 101214: The issue is resolved, and it wasn’t due to “the loop” as I originally suspected. A hunch that it might be a plug-in to blame, and a quick Google-search, gave away the solution. And the newsletter is now published.

Disclosure and disclaimer: I am engaged in the SAIL project, on behalf of Ericsson. However the opinions expressed in this post are my personal, and not those of the SAIL project or my employer.

At the recent IETF meeting in Beijing there was a lot of activity that is of interest for SAIL.

In this post I will concentrate on those relating to Network of Information (NetInf). Overall it can be said that the issue of how to name information objects pops up in a lot of contexts. It is becoming apparent that for things like caching and streaming and p2p it is beneficial if you can name information objects directly. In this way it is easier to see if you already have a copy of the object. Below are some observations from work groups (WGs) and BOFs.

Namebased sockets BOF

Large interest including all relevant ADs. The BOF was chaired by Christian Vogt (Ericsson) and Martin Stiemerling (NEC Labs). The main draft was presented by Javier Ubillos (SICS). There were also presentations from Apple and Microsoft. It is clear that there is a strong need for internal coordination regarding the naming issue for the future internet.

IoT BarBOF

Fairly large confusion about what the scope should be (as can be expected at a BarBOF). Trying to figure out how to structure the work and which issues to address. It was pointed out that IRTF can hardly expect to be leading the work in this area as there are so many large projects addressing this going on in the research community. IRTF needs to find a niche or some type of coordinating role. It was suggested that it might be good to focus on some particular issue. Naming was one issue that was brought forward. Short papers on suggestions on scope and issues will be invited before the next IETF when they expect to have a regular BOF. We should make such a contribution bringing up ideas on object to object communication as well as one on the NetInf naming scheme.

DECADE

The work is progressing well in a good atmosphere. The chairs invited the presenters for an informal lunch meeting before the IETF session. The problem statement and survey draft are moving towards WG last call. We will contribute a section on NetInf to the survey document before that. There is now a first version of an architecture document. The requirements have been made more strict and contains now sharper and more focused requirements. Thoughts on how to make the design have been moved into the architecture document. Börje Ohlman (Ericsson) presented the draft draft-ohlman-decade-add-use-cases-reqs-02 which was very well received and those of the requirements that has not already been adopted into the requirements and architecture drafts already, since last meeting, will be done so after some further refinement. Especially the requirement on naming needs further word-smithing. DECADE is now ready for further discussion on naming. We should make a new version of the PPSP draft on naming which is focusing on the particulars of DECADE. A key issues to address is how to make it possible for existing P2P applications to use their existing naming schemes and still take advantage of DECADE. Another key issue is to make it possible for future applications to share the same object using a common DECADE name space.

PSPP

The Secure naming draft was presented by Ove Strandberg (NSN), though it only got 10 min at the end of the session it was well received. It can be noted that David Bryan went up to the microphone to recommend people to really read the draft as well as the NetInf naming paper that was published at the Global Internet Symposium in the beginning of this year. Next step for naming in PPSP is to formulate requirements for naming that can go into the requirements draft. We should write a draft for next IETF suggesting such requirements.

Disclosure and disclaimer: I am engaged in the SAIL project, on behalf of Ericsson. However the opinions expressed in this post are my personal, and not those of the SAIL project or my employer.

A month ago, I gave a talk in the EC concertation meeting in Brussels about the price of quality in the Internet. During the talk I focused on two things: 1) defining the term quality in different domains, and 2) explaining which stakeholders in the Internet content delivery are willing to pay for quality. Because the topic may be of wider interest, I give an overview to my presentation slides in the following screencast.

The presentation itself does not contain any results from the SAIL project, because the project itself is only a couple of months old. Thus the material comes from the earlier work done mostly in the Prof. Heikki Hämmäinen’s  Network Economics research group in the Aalto University. The quality in communications ecosystems analysis is based on Kalevi Kilkki’s paper Quality of Experience in Communications Ecosystem. The two-sided market and value network analysis of Internet content delivery, for one, relies heavily on Nan Zhang’s recently published Master’s Thesis Internet content delivery as a two-sided market, which was done in the frame of Finnish national Future Internet programme.

One of the most interesting topics in the presentation is the two-sided markets theory. Two-sided markets are economic platforms having two distinct user groups that provide each other with network benefits. Example markets include credit cards, composed of cardholders and merchants; operating systems (end-users and developers), yellow pages (advertisers and consumers); video games (gamers and game developers); and communication networks, such as the Internet. Good introduction to the theory can be found from Wikipedia, and Zhang’s thesis presents the application of the theory in Internet content delivery.

Screencast recorded after the presentation

The screen cast is published in two parts (part 1 and part 2) and also available as a playlist with both parts.

The slides used in the presentation are found here (link).

Links to references used in the presentation

• Faratin P. (2007), Economics of Overlay Networks: An Industrial Organization Perspective on Network Economics, Proceedings of NetEcon+IBC, San Diego, California, June 11.
• Kilkki K. (2008), Quality of Experience in Communication Ecosystems, Journal of Universal Computer Science, vol. 14, no. 5, pp. 615-624.
• Labowitz C., Iekel-Johnson S., McPherson D., Oberheide J., Jahanian, F. (2010), Internet Inter-Domain Traffic, Sigcomm’10, pp. 75-86, New Delhi, India.
• Rochet J., Tirole J. (2006),Two-Sided Markets: A Progress Report, The RAND Journal of Economics, Vol. 37, No. 3, Autumn, 2006, pp. 645-667.
• Zhang N. (2010), Internet content delivery as a two-sided market. Master’s Thesis, Department of Communications and Networking, Aalto University School of Science and Technology, 2010.
• Wikipedia (2010), Two-sided market.

Disclosure and disclaimer: I am engaged in the SAIL project, on behalf of Aalto University. However the opinions expressed in this post are my personal, and not those of the SAIL project or my employer.

About author
M.Sc. (Tech) Tapio Levä is a Research Scientist and PhD student in the Department of Communications and Networking of Aalto University. His research interests cover techno-economics of Internet standards adoption, Internet architecture evolution, Internet interconnectivity agreements and Future Internet scenarios. In the SAIL project Levä focuses on the business aspects in the socio-economic task of WP-A. Contact information and publication list can be found from his academic web page.

Let´s be honest with each others; you as well as me are immigrants in the digital society.

We are not born into it although we have adapted pretty well to the standards, manners and customs that have emerged since April 22nd, 1993.

A fair amount of you who reads these lines can even address yourself as settlers in this digital society. You were the ones that actually laid the grounds and paved the way for what was going to come by developing and contributing to the protocols that today founds the basis of what most of takes for granted, reluctantly for some and willingly for others – the net! I certainly was not one of you, although I am now involved in a project aimed to define the network of our grandchildren – who am I to do that?!

I was 20 years 1993. It was also the year when I started to become friend with computers and “IT” (as in the buzzwords of those years) in general. I realized that a computer connected to a network could actually be considered a friend that helps me gain time – not only an enemy pocking on my attention and stealing my time. Some years later and still a novice on the subject, I started to read the bible of that time, “Data and Computer Communications” at a stretch and suddenly it all came together. I have never longed much for the technical details but the overall picture of internetworking now started form the basis for future whereabouts and this book became my reference ever since.

Looking in the rear mirror and generalizing a bit, all decades have their distinguishing mark. In terms of networking, the 1960s characteristic would be the ARPANET as the worlds first functioning packet switched network, followed by the -70s with important communications protocols like X.25, DECnet and Ethernet. Then came the -80s where the foundation of today’s Internet was laid by describing protocols in terms of the OSI-model and the special adaptation of it into TCP/IP. During the -90s we created todays de-facto references like “Browsers” and “www” and during the -00s the focus shifted towards the actual behaviors and usage of the network by the rise of all kinds of “Communities”.

So, what is the distinguishing mark of the 2010s? “Anything as a Service”?

And what will represent the digital society of tomorrow, the society that our grandchildren will be born into and take for granted?

Together, in SAIL, our aim should be to open our minds and views and put ourselves into the context of people that will be born in the 2020s and onwards. What kind of digital society will they take for granted, whereas their parents will feel like they are the immigrants?

Curious about 22 April 1993?  Simple! It was the day of release for the 1.0 version of Mosaic web browser. A mile-stone that can well mark the start of the digital society that we are now living in, and that is just about to get its first natives reaching lawful age!

Photo from Wikipedia, by Ragib Hasan. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5.

Disclosure and disclaimer: I am engaged in the SAIL project, on behalf of Ericsson. However the opinions expressed in this post are my personal, and not those of the SAIL project or my employer.

A project like SAIL, which involves individuals spread out across a number of partner organisations and across multiple countries and even more physical locations, needs ways to ensure good interaction between everyone involved.

Yes, we do interact using various on-line channels daily. We also need to interact face-to-face sometimes. Such meetings takes place with smaller groups within the SAIL project on a continuous basis. SAIL also have General Meetings a few times every year, where everyone in the project is invited.

The 2nd SAIL General Meeting will be hosted by one of the SAIL partner organisations; University of Cantabria in Santander, Spain. This meeting is held to interact, discuss and work towards the second round of deliverables for the project. It is also an important opportunity for all partners to meet up in real life.

We will gather on February 22-24, 2011, in Palacio de la Magdalena, Santander, Spain!
Our host will be Luis Munoz and his colleagues at University of Cantabria in Santander, Spain.

Disclosure and disclaimer: I am engaged in the SAIL project, on behalf of Ericsson. However the opinions expressed in this post are my personal, and not those of the SAIL project or my employer.