Sailor's Inn

It’s not every day that a group of colleagues in a project funded by the European Commission decides to take some extra work on themselves, and accepts the challenge of putting together in a book the project’s key results.

Well, this is what happened with 4WARD (Architecture and Design for the Future Internet), which ran from Jan. 2008 until June 2010.

With the support of the project management a team was put in place, involving colleagues from all Work Packages, and addressing all technical areas of the project. Taking inputs from project deliverables, contributed by almost all project participants, chapter editors had a crucial role in getting the most important results into their contribution. The result was a comprehensive book about the techniques that are envisaged to be part of the development of the networks of the future, together with some non-technical views on these technologies.

The book’s title is the one from the project, “Architecture and Design for the Future Internet”, and it has been published by Springer, at the beginning of 2011. Detailed information on the book, including the Table of Content and some sample pages, is available at Springer.

You can buy the book directly from Springer, or from Amazon.

Do take a look at it!

Disclosure and disclaimer: I am engaged in SAIL, an ICT project about the Future Internet, 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.

This week large part of our hardware was delivered to our premises. SAIL WPD (Work package Cloud Networking) has set out to build a large prototype of a cloud network spanning three different hosting sites. One of the sites will be in HP in Bristol, another one will be in Ericsson Stockholm and the last one will be in Institut Telecom, Paris. Additionally, we may connect the prototype to the existing infrastructure of GRID5000.

SAIL WPD Ericsson hardware

The hardware we chose for this testbed is based on powerful HP servers (D380) featuring 12 cores each @2.8GHz. Each of the servers has plenty of memory (48GB) to allow for a large number of virtual machines to be deployed. The servers feature Intel NICs (X520-DA2) with 2x10GbE ports and hardware support for virtualization (VMDq).

These servers are going to be connected locally through an HP E5406 switch and to the other sites via IPSec tunnels. The IPSec tunnels will be established using state of the art Clavister firewalls.

At Ericsson we are currently in the process of installing these servers. Soon we should have some blinking lights in the rack.

So why do we need all of this hardware? Well, look out for my next post.

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

We can not leave under silence the launch last week of the new Open Networking Foundation. This event must be highlighted not only because some of the SAIL partners are involved in the ONF (NEC, HP, Ericsson) but mainly because OpenFlow is in direct relation with the Open Connectivity Services work package in SAIL.

Initially launched as a technology enabling network and application experimentation in campus networks, OpenFlow has since then been perceived to have disruptive potential to obtain low cost high value networking devices. Data centres are good examples of situations where the classical network equipment does not fulfils the costs and characteristic requirements (see Hamilton’s blog post) and where OpenFlow can be a high-potential replacement candidate. That also explains why Facebook, Google and Yahoo! are part of the ONF Board of Directors.

OpenFlow does not raise interests only in data centres. In the FP-7 SPARC project, study is ongoing to determine if operators could benefit from the split between control and forwarding planes that OpenFlow provides. They are also looking at the challenges of supporting carrier grade operations.
Some research is also ongoing to apply OpenFlow not only to control packets networks but also to optical networks (FP7 project Ofelia is a good example of that).

With the publication of the 1.1 specification at the end of last year, the launch of the ONF and the participation of large connectivity consumers, OpenFlow seems to gain a high momentum that can not be ignored by researchers in the connectivity and networking domain.

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

By Ramón Agüero and Marta García-Arranz

With some delay after the meeting, we wanted to share our view (better say our feelings) about its organizational aspects. It was quite a heavy couple of weeks, but everything worked out well at the end and we were really satisfied about the outcome. That was also what we obtained with the attendees’ feedback. Santander will always welcome SAIL and it will maybe see most of the SAILors in 2012, during the Summer School.

It’s been around one month since we finished with the 2^nd SAIL General Meeting, and still we haven’t had the time to sync again. First of all, we must say that, despite the hard times before and during the meeting, all the people who shared the organization burden were really happy about the outcome.

The beginning was not that good, though…

We were probably too optimistic, but we only visited the Palace on the Thursday before the week of the meeting. Everything seemed to be fine in the beginning: the catering, we had enough beamers, we had also gathered some whiteboards.

But, there were no tables in any of the rooms! To be honest we were rather concerned about this, but we thought there was little to do about it. Luckily, with the help of Lola and Fátima (who we would really to thank for their support) and a last-minute-call to a local contact sorted out the issue.

Then the meeting started, and although the weather forecast said that we should not have had much showers, it rained cats and dogs for almost 24 hours during Monday and Tuesday. The participants from work package C and D had to suffer this while walking from the university and the restaurant. I know that some guys were really soaking when the arrived at the hotel that night… First day was over.

Thomas giving the SAIL ale to the host...

Tuesday came again with gray sky. Everybody went up to the Palacio and the main meeting started. We got interesting project-wide presentations and the session of the host, which was (despite its academic background) well received. At least we had the SAIL ale.

...and the host receiving it.

After a not-so-well-understood finger-type buffet (the catering people believed that we were going to stand up during lunch) we broke in workpackage sessions. On Tuesday work package C organized a dinner, and the Yammer tool opened it to other people. It was a nice night at “El Riojano”. Second day was over.

Crowded table during the prototyping theme meeting

Sun was not arriving (even on Wednesday) and we were starting to loose our optimism about this point. The day started with theme and cross work package meetings, and the most crowded one (prototyping) completed the table where top guys have been discussing relevant issues in the past.

We benefitted from the first sun lights of the whole week and we took some nice group pictures (SAIL appeared in the local press). That night we had the social event, enjoying a nice dinner at Deluz. Third day was over.

Press Release in Alerta, March, 1st 2011

Thursday was the last day for most of the people, and guess what – the sun arrived! The shuttle service had a problem with the first passengers (due to an accident), but everything worked out fine at the end… It was funny to see all the people taking photographs. We could feel that this was coming to an end, since the activity was somehow reducing smoothly. At 18:00, the last guys left. Fourth day was over, and we were almost there. Afterwards we needed to collect all the material from the Palace. WPB had a dinner and some rumors were heard about having a good time…

On Friday, with really nice weather, WPB met at the University; we had a not-so-nice coffee break and we enjoyed (with the late birds) a nice lunch in a restaurant nearby. The last shuttle left at 15:00. Fifth day was over and we could not even believe it.

We only hope that the stay of the +80 people in Santander was nice; it was really a pleasure having all of them here. At the end the whole thing worked out quite nicely and we will also organize the 2012 SAIL Summer School… We hope to welcome some of you again (this time with some more sun).

Disclosure and disclaimer: we are engaged in SAIL, an ICT project about the Future Internet, on behalf of University of Cantabria. However the opinions expressed in this post are our personal ones, and not those of the SAIL project or our employer.

The 2nd issue of the SAIL Newsletter is out, in time for the project review, as planned.

Publishing a newsletter is usual in many activities, and it’s difficult to keep track of all of those related to the areas we are interested in. Still, I find a newsletter of use not only for the potential readers, but also for those involved in publishing it: for the latter, it’s a good way to check what has been done, and to extract the highlights of our work in a given period of time; for the former, if they do it as I do, I browse the contents for a minute, and then, if there is a subject of interest, I read it in detail. So, in the end, I think there’s added value in a  newsletter, for both sides.

Additionally, a newsletter is a good way to inform the researchers external to the consortium of the progress being achieved in the project. Given that the project is partially funded by the European Commission (i.e., public funding), dissemination plays a major role in project activities, and publishing a newsletter fills in a gap. The SAIL Newsletter is being distributed electronically (you can register to receive it via the project’s website) and on paper at events where project’s members participate. This way, we want to reach not only the colleagues that want to follow the project on a regular basis, but also to present the project to researchers that may not be aware of it.

Enjoy the reading!

Disclosure and disclaimer: I am engaged in SAIL, an ICT project about the Future Internet, 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.

So much for a time-plan!

All EC-funded projects are regularly reviewed in order to ensure that they fulfill the requirements and expected outcome. SAIL is no exception.

I´m currently at our first SAIL review meeting where we are at the target for three assigned external reviewers – longing for finding out all the aspects of what we have done, what we are about to do and not the least why we are doing it. And I must say they are really interested!

We had an agenda initially. However, just having started our presentations, it was instantaneously scrutinized. We are literarily bombarded with interesting, relevant, reflecting and many times challenging questions. That’s good! It shows that there is a genuine interest in our work – from all three reviewers’ perspective and backgrounds, being it physics, computer science or network operations. On the down-side though, I wonder whether I will make my flight back home on time today…

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

Guest post: Per Karlsson, manager at Ericsson Research, is not directly involved in the SAIL project but oversees and sponsors the Ericsson part of the SAIL project.

Hi SAILors!

Congrats, I saw that you had managed to get two articles about SAIL in the Swedish magazine Ny Teknik.

There is one article covering the overall SAIL project (translated), as well as one covering NetInf and the involvement from SICS (translated).

I am happy to see these and other press coverage of the SAIL project, as it make the work you are doing more visible.

Keep up the good work!

Disclosure and disclaimer: I work at Ericsson. However the opinions expressed in this post are my personal, and not those of my employer.

Second General Meeting, 22nd-24th of February 2011, Santander, Spain

And so, the week for the General Meeting in Cantabria was here… I was about to get to meet all these people that I had been in more or less daily contact with over email and telephone for the last six weeks. My expectations were high and I was really curious to meet all my new colleagues within the project.

86 SAILors from all 24 project partners covering 9 European countries, Israel and Australia was gathered at the beautiful Palacio de la Magdalena in a February rainy Santander, Spain. We were all looking forward to three days filled with interesting presentations, side-by-side work, fruitful discussions and, not the least nice informal talks and socializing with project colleagues.

The meeting opened up with project management presenting not only the results and achievements of the first six months of SAIL, but also the plans and challenges for the next phase to come. We were all asked to consider ‘what we would like our grandchildren to take for granted regarding the future information society?’ This made me reflect and get somewhat a new perspective of the work along the course and the goals of SAIL.
An interesting presentation of our host University of Cantabria was also given, including some historical highlights of the former Royal seasonal residence built in 1912, where our meeting took place. The rest of the week was to be filled with PMT (Project Management Team) and POET (Project Overall Engineering Team) meetings, WP (Work Packages) and Theme meetings as well as cross WP/Theme meetings.

This Santander meeting rendered a great opportunity to once again (or, as for myself, for the first time) meet face-to-face and to cover a lot of ground together. Apart from enabling discussions and getting a face on ‘all those names’, the meeting also opened up for new work interactions and new personal contacts. Despite the long and intense work days (and ‘spanishly’ late dinners), all SAILors kept up the good spirit and took every chance to just chat with old and new friends.

Unfortunately, during the first days of the meeting the weather forecast kept its promises on a cloudy sky with showers of rain and wind. But on Wednesday the clouds dispersed and the wind slackened, making Thursday perfectly sunny, showing us visitors the real beauty of Santander by the sea. The view from the palace on the hill out there on the peninsula, looking out on the Santander bay and the town and beach of Sardinero in the other direction, was absolutely marvelous!

Much had happened, and a lot of impressions had filled my mind, when it was time to leave Santander. The meeting had exceeded my expectations, with the beauty of Santander, the generosity of the hosts and all these genial people engaged in SAIL! In contrast to the harsh cross-winds, that made my flight land heavy first on the second (!) attempt upon arrival in Bilbao, I now had a feeling that these Cantabrian winds had turned to our favor making us sail into the next project phase as an even stronger and more vivid team. A team of which I am very proud and happy to be a part of!

Picture by SANE DM, used with permission

Disclosure and disclaimer: I am engaged in SAIL, an ICT project about the Future Internet, 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 large research project is not only about dispassionate and totally objective research. It is also about human beings, being involved in their own daily life, with their own quirks, imperfections, and oddities. Such human aspects do come up over lunch, in the evening over dinner, or at similar events. This has happened to me as well, and after an initial shock, my colleagues urged me to come forward with this oddity and get it off my chest. So, here it comes:

I do not own a cell phone.

Well, strictly speaking, I do own one, but I do not know where it is and I’ve lost the charger long ago. Also don’t have a SIM card for it.

I understand this is shocking. Plainly, I never had the need for one, rarely make phone calls, cannot express things in SMS format.

On the other hand, I do use email, Web, Internet in general extensively. I even use it in a mobile form. The interesting and challenging question for me (as a personal user, apart from the researcher’s perspective) is how the future Internet will support other use cases, make it easier to develop new applications, provide a perspective on things that are currently not feasible at acceptable cost (either development cost or operational cost). It might well be that these applications will dwarf the relevance that is attached today to the cell phone and mobile voice communication. In such cases, even I might turn into an avid user of small, mobile communication devices.

Image from Flickr, by Mykl Roventine. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

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

From December 5th to 8th 2010, the Dagstuhl Seminar 10492 on “Information-Centric Networking” was held in Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed.

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is one of the significant directions of current networking research. In ICN, the principal paradigm is not end-to-end communication between hosts – as it is in the current Internet architecture. Instead, the increasing amount of content that must be distributed requires alternatives: Architectures that work with information objects as a first-class abstraction; focusing on the properties of such objects and receivers’ interests to achieve efficient and reliable distribution of such objects. Such architectures make in-network storage, multiparty communication through replication, and interaction models such as publish-subscribe generally available for all kinds of applications, without having to resort to dedicated systems such as peer-to-peer overlays and proprietary content-distribution networks. The ICN approach is currently being explored by a number of research projects, both in Europe (4WARD, SAIL, PSIRP) and in the US (DONA, CCN).

The Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) community has developed a message-oriented architecture that has been used along with ICN addressing and routing concepts. While these approaches differ with respect to their specific architecture, they share some assumptions, objectives and certain structuring architectural properties. In general, the aim is to develop network architectures that are better suited for content distribution, the currently prevailing usage of communication networks, and that better cope with disruptions in the communication service. The basic idea of ICN still leaves room for many variations. The Dagstuhl ICN seminar was intended as a catalyst for these variations and as a forum for discussing the following research topics:

• The relationship of networking architecture innovation vs. so-called over-the-top approaches in the application layer
• The support of an Internet of Things and Services by an ICN architecture
• How to migrate towards an information-centric architecture, and whether and how to use it as a migration enabler for, e.g., an IPv4/IPv6 technology step
• The role of and needs for naming and addressing and name resolution systems, along with the necessary security aspects of a naming scheme; a fundamental dichotomy between flat and hierarchical naming schemes needs to be resolved
• Efficiency and robustness of ICN data dissemination vs. specific content distribution overlay solutions
• The desirability of using specific transport protocols for ICN vs. the use of standard protocols like TCP or disruption tolerant protocols like the DTN Bundle protocol
• The integration and placement of caches inside a network
• Can the introduction of a new ICN architecture enable new types of applications that were too complex to create/operate/deploy/maintain in traditional networks?

The seminar delivered a comprehensive analysis of the state of the art in information-centric networking, progress on specific technical issues such as scalable addressing and content distribution, a better understanding of the legal requirements and application developer needs. It also touched upon possible next steps in research and helped to form an ICN community. The seminar has led to the organization of a SIGCOMM workshop on the same topic that is co-organized by seminar organizers and participants.

Organizers

• Bengt Ahlgren (Swedish Institute of Computer Science – Kista, SE)
• Holger Karl (Universität Paderborn, DE)
• Dirk Kutscher (NEC Laboratories Europe – Heidelberg, DE)
• Börje Ohlman (Ericsson Research – Stockholm, SE)
• Sara Oueslati (Orange Labs, FR)
• Ignacio Solis (PARC – Palo Alto, US)

Official seminar material

• Web page: http://www.dagstuhl.de/en/program/calendar/semhp/?semnr=10492
• Most of the presentation slides from the seminar are available online.
• Prooceedings of Dagstuhl Seminar on Information-Centric Networking

ICN overview paper, provided by SAIL partners as input to the seminar

• A Survey of Information-Centric Networking

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