Dirk Kutscher

We have fixed the program for our Capacity Sharing Workshop on October 13th this year. We have received excellent contributions — it’s going to be a very interesting event.

The technical program:

08:30 Registration and Coffee
08:45 Welcome
09:00

Session 1: Congestion Management in Mobile Broadband Networks

10:45 Coffee
11:00

Session 2: Transport Layer QoS

12:45 Lunch
13:45 Session 3: QoS in Wireless Networks

Hatem Abou-zeid, Stefan Valentin (Bell Labs Alcatel-Lucent Stuttgart)
and Hossam Hassanein (Queen’s University, Canada)

15:30 Coffee
15:45

Session 4: Applications and Services

17:30 Wrap-Up and Conclusions
18:00 End

Check out the details at the workshop website.

We have published a short report of last week’s ICN workshop at SIGCOMM. It was a really interesting event, with excellent papers and presentations and an inspiring panel discussion.

The two selected best papers are:

Ali Ghodsi, Teemu Koponen, Jarno Rajahalme, Pasi Sarolahti and Scott Shenker; Naming in Content-Oriented Architectures

Diego Perino and Matteo Varvello; A Reality Check for Content Centric Networking

You can download them and all the other papers at the workshop website.

With the increasing amount of IP traffic in fixed and mobile access networks, the question how to share the available resources in a fair, efficient and demand-oriented way becomes more and more prevalent. With the variety of services one can find in today’s Internet, the requirements in rate, data volume and latency differ strongly. To maximize resource utilization and, at the same time, provide satisfying performance to all users, application layer knowledge is needed. As different resource allocation and adaptation mechanisms already exist in MAC, transport and application layer, an integral consideration of the problem space is required.

In wireless networks, the problem is particularly relevant due to the inherently limited resources, which render a simple “throwing bandwidth at the problem” solution impossible. Because large over-provisioning factors are economically unfeasibly, similar questions on capacity sharing also arise in fixed access networks, such as high bandwidth passive optical networks or cable networks.

NEC Laboratories Europe and the Institute of Communication Networks and Computer Engineering (IKR) of the University of Stuttgart are organizing workshop on Capacity Sharing to address these topics. The objective of this workshop is to bring together stakeholders of mobile and fixed access networks, the classic Internet world and of the application and transport community. We solicit presentations on the state-of-the-art, results of ongoing research, open issues, trends and new ideas. We are especially looking forward to (possibly provocative) visionary presentations to foster a lively discussion about how to face the upcoming challenges in the future mobile Internet. Topics of particular interest include, but are not limited to

• Application-layer adaption for mobile services
• Transport layer solutions and possible interactions with cellular/fixed access networks
• Context-aware resource allocation & cross-layer adaptation
• QoE and fairness definitions, metrics and evaluation
• Data traffic characteristics in fixed and mobile Internet
• Economic aspects on capacity sharing and business models
• Similarities and differences of capacity sharing in mobile and fixed access networks
• Related standardization activities and projects

The workshop takes place in Stuttgart on Thursday, October 13, 2011, and is organized by Mirja Kühlewind (IKR), Christian Mueller (IKR) and myself.

More information: http://www.ikr.uni-stuttgart.de/CapacitySharingWS/

URIs [RFC3986] are used in various protocols for identifying resources. In many deployments those URIs contain strings that are hash function outputs in order to ensure uniqueness in terms of mapping the URI to a specific resource, or to make URIs hard to guess for security reasons. However, there is no standard way to interpret those strings and so today in general only the creator of the URI knows how to use the hash function output.

In the context of information-centric networking and elsewhere there is value in being able to compare a presented resource against the URI that was de-referenced in order to access that resource. If a cryptographically-strong comparison function can be used then this allows for many forms of in-network storage, without requiring as much trust in the infrastructure used to present the resource. The outputs of hash functions can be used in this manner, if presented in a standard way. There are also many other potential uses for these hash outputs, for example, in terms of binding the URI to an owner via signatures and public keys, mapping between names, handling versioning etc. Many such uses can be based on “wrapping” the object with meta-data, e.g. including signatures, public key certificates etc.

We therefore define the “ni” URI scheme that allows for, but does not insist upon, checking of the integrity of the URI/resource mapping.

The “ni” URI scheme is specified in draft-farrell-ni-00

The Internet is already made of things. However, we expect there
to be many more less-capable things, such as sensors and
actuators, connected to the Internet in years to come. In
parallel, Internet applications are more and more being used to
perform operations on named (information) objects, and various
Information-Centric Networking (ICN) approaches are being
researched in order to allow such applications to work
effectively at scale and with various forms of mobility and in
networking environments that are more challenging than a
traditional access network and data center. In a recent position
paper, we outline some benefits that may accrue, and issues that
arise, should the Internet, with many more things, make use of
the ICN approach to networking and we argue that ICN concepts
should be considered when planning for increases in the number of
things connected to the Internet.

Venue: Interconnecting Smart Objects with the Internet Workshop Prague, Friday, 25th March 2011
Paper: http://www.iab.org/about/workshops/smartobjects/papers/Kutscher.pdf
Presentation: http://www.iab.org/about/workshops/smartobjects/slides/Kutscher.pdf

We have submitted a new version of the DECADE architecture draft, which is now a work item of the IETF DECADE WG.

Abstract:
Peer-to-peer (P2P) applications have become widely used on the
Internet today and make up a large portion of the traffic in many
networks. One technique to improve the network efficiency of P2P
applications is to introduce storage capabilities within the
networks. The DECADE Working Group has been formed with the goal of
developing an architecture to provide this capability. This document
presents an architecture, discusses the underlying principles, and
identifies core components and protocols supporting the architecture.

The Internet Draft: draft-ietf-decade-arch

We have written a description about how congestion exposure (as being worked on in the IETF CONEX WG) can be be used in mobile communication networks such as LTE.

Abstract:

This memo describes a mobile communications use case for congestion
exposure (CONEX) with a particular focus on mobile communication
networks such as 3GPP LTE. The draft describes the architecture of
these networks (access and core networks), current QoS mechanisms and
then discusses how congestion exposure concepts could be applied.
Based on this, this memo suggests a set of requirements for CONEX
mechanisms that particularly apply to mobile networks.

The Internet Draft: draft-kutscher-conex-mobile

The Internet Architecture Board, the IETF Internet Area, the IETF Routing Area, the IETF Applications Area, the Czech Technical University in Prague, and the European Commission will hold a workshop on the Friday, 25th March 2011 in Prague on the topic “Interconnecting Smart Objects with the Internet”.

More: http://www.iab.org/about/workshops/smartobjects/

Following up on the December 2010 Dagstuhl seminar on ICN, we have set up a mailing for general ICN-related discussion. If you are interested to join, please sign up here.

The proceedings of our 2010 Dagstuhl seminar on Information-Centric Networking have been published.

They are available online: [2010 Dagstuhl ICN seminar proceedings]