Dirk Kutscher

ACM SIGCOMM CCR just published the report of our 2021 DINRG meeting on Centralization in the Internet.

Executive Summary

There is a consensus within the networking community that the Internet consolidation and centralization trend has progressed rapidly over recent years, as measured by the structural changes to the data delivery infrastructure, the control power over system platforms, application development and deployment, and even in the standard development efforts. This trend has brought impactful technical, societal, and economical consequences.

When the Internet was first conceived as a decentralized system 40+ years back, few people, if any, could have foreseen how it looks today. How has the Internet evolved from there to here? What have been the driving forces for the observed consolidation? From a retrospective view, was there anything that might have been done differently to influence the course the Internet has taken? And most importantly, what should and can be done now to mitigate the trend of centralization? Although there are significant interests in these topics, there has not been much structured discussion on how to answer these important questions.

The IRTF Research Group on Decentralizing the Internet (DINRG) organized a workshop on “Centralization in the Internet” on June 3, 2021, with the objective of starting an organized open discussion on the above questions. Although there seems to be an urgent need for effective countermeasures to the centralization problem, this workshop took a step back: before jumping into solution development to steer the Internet away from centralization, we wanted to discuss how the Internet has evolved and changed, and what have been the driving forces and enablers for those changes. The organizers and part of the community believe that a sound and evidence-based understanding is the key towards devising effective remedy and action plans. In particular, we would like to deepen our understanding of the relationship between the architectural properties and economic developments.

This workshop consisted of two panels, each panel started with an opening presentation, followed by panel discussions, then open-floor discussions. There was also an all-hand discussion at the end. Three hours of the workshop presentations and discussions showed that this Internet centralization problem space is highly complex and filled with intrinsic interplays between technical and economic factors.

This report aims to summarize the workshop outcome with a broad-brush picture of the problem space. We hope that this big picture view could help the research group, as well as the broader IETF community, to reach a clearer and shared high-level understanding of the problem, and from there to identify what actions are needed, which of them require technical solutions, and which of them are regulatory issues which require technical community to provide inputs to regulatory sectors to develop effective regulation policies.

You can find the report in the ACM Digital Library. We also have a pre-print version.

The 2015 ICN conference has started in San Francisco today!

Program Overview

Wednesday

• Tutorials on CCN and NDN
• Posters and demostrations

Thursday

• Keynote by Van Jacobson: Improving the Internet with ICN
• Paper presentations on Routing, Node Architectures
• Panel: ICN -- next two years
• Poster Presentations

Friday

• Paper presentation on In-Network Caching, Content & Applications, Security
• Posters and demostrations

 

 

The Call for Papers for the 2nd ACM Conference on ICN is out:

 

                         Call for Papers

** 2nd ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ICN 2015) **

 

Sponsored by ACM and ACM SIGCOMM

 

http://conferences.sigcomm.org/acm-icn/2015

 

San Francisco, USA, September 30 - October 2, 2015

 

 

Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a new network architecture intended to provide access to information without requiring an explicit binding of that information to a particular location. By directly addressing information, ICN supports mobile users and mobile networked devices, offers a higher-level communication service to applications, and promotes authentication and efficiency in the transmission and dissemination of information. Over the last few years, a global research and development community has grown around the idea of ICN.

 

ACM ICN 2015 is the second edition of the ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking, which follows a series of workshops on ICN held in conjunction with the ACM Sigcomm conference.  ACM ICN 2015 is the premier international forum for researchers and practitioners to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, experiences, and challenges in information centric networking.  ACM ICN 2015 will be a single-track conference featuring paper and poster presentations, panel discussions, and demonstrations.

 

The Technical Program Committee of ACM ICN 2015 invites high-quality submissions describing unpublished research results in all aspects of ICN, with particular emphasis on contributions to architectural designs and reproducible experimental evaluations.  Papers submitted for consideration should not have been already published elsewhere and should not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere during the consideration period.

Specifically, authors are required to adhere to the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism

(http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/plagiarism_policy) and the ACM Policy on Prior Publication and Simultaneous Submissions (http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/sim_submissions).

 

Topics of interest include:

 

* Architecture design and evaluation

* Comparison of different ICN architectures

* Interoperability across ICN architectures

* ICN evaluation methodology and metrics

* Analysis of scalability issues in ICN

* ICN enabled applications

* Routing in ICN

* Transport issues in ICN

* Caching

* Mobility support

* Trust management and access control

* Management in ICN

* ICN economics and business models

* Tools, experimentation facilities, and measurement methodology for ICN

* Experience from implementation

* Feasibility studies of ICN for high speed networking

* Privacy

* ICN Deployment

* ICN APIs

 

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Submission Instructions

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Submitted papers can be up to 10 pages in length following the SIGCOMM format. All submissions must be in English and in PDF format. Submissions that do not comply with these instructions will be rejected without review.

Papers must be submitted electronically through the ICN 2015 submission site.

 

Submissions will be reviewed and evaluated on the basis of originality, importance of contribution, soundness, evaluation, quality of presentation and appropriate comparison to related work. The program committee as a whole will make final decisions about which submissions to accept for presentation at the conference. The program committee may propose that authors present their work with a poster accompanied by a 2-page extended abstract. ACM ICN 2015 also invites proposals for demos, tutorials and panel sessions.

 

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Important Dates

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Full Paper Submission: May 22, 2015

Acceptance Notification: July 20, 2015

Camera Ready Due: Aug. 15, 2015

Conference: September 30 - October 2, 2015

 

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Conference General Chairs

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- Nacho (Ignacio) Solis (PARC, USA)

 

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Technical Program Committee Chairs

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- Antonio Carzaniga (USI, Switzerland)

- K. K. Ramakrishnan (UC Riverside, USA)

 

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Technical Program Committee Members

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- Mayutan Arumaithurai (University of Goettingen, Germany)

- Giuseppe Bianchi (University of Rome "Tor Vergata", Italy)

- Nicola Blefari-Melazzi (University of Rome "Tor Vergata", Italy)

- Jeff Burke (UCLA, USA)

- Kenneth Calvert (University of Kentuky, USA)

- Giovanna Carofiglio (Cisco)

- Patrick Crowley (Washington University, USA)

- Christian Esteve Rothenberg (UNICAMP, Brazil)

- JJ Garcia-Luna-Aceves (University of California Santa Cruz, USA)

- Toru Hasegawa (Osaka University, Japan)

- Jussi Kangasharju (University of Helsinki, Finland)

- Satyajayant Misra (New Mexico State University, USA)

- Vishal Misra (Columbia University, USA)

- Luca Muscariello (Orange Labs, France)

- Kiran Nagaraja (Ericsson)

- Dave Oran (Cisco, USA)

- Jörg Ott (Aalto University, Finland)

- Christos Papadopoulos (Colorado State University, USA)

- Craig Partridge (BBN, USA)

- Diego Perino (Alcatel Lucent, France)

- George Polyzos (AUEB, Greece)

- Yiannis Psaras (UCL, UK)

- Dipankar Raychaudhuri (Rutgers University, USA)

- Jim Roberts (IRT SystemX, France)

- Dario Rossi (Telecom ParisTech, France)

- Thomas Schmidt (HAW Hamburg, Germany)

- Jan Seedorf (NEC Labs Europe)

- Nacho (Ignacio) Solis (PARC, USA)

- Karen Sollins (MIT, USA)

- Christian Tschudin (Uni Basel, Switzerland)

- Arun Venkataramani (UMass, USA)

- Matthias Wählisch (FU Berlin, Germany)

- Roy Yates (Rutgers University, USA)

- Lixia Zhang (UCLA, USA)

 

 

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More Details

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Please see http://conferences.sigcomm.org/acm-icn/2015

 

The program of our Capacity Sharing Workshop at SIGCOMM-2014 (CSWS-2014, August 18th in Chicago) is online. This should be an interesting workshop -- we have received many interesting submissions and were able to compile a real good program:

 

Queuing and Scheduling

•  Revisiting Old Friends: Is CoDel Really Achieving What RED Cannot? (Nicolas Kuhn, Emmanuel Lochin and Olivier Mehani)
• Managing Fairness and Application Performance with Active Queue Management in DOCSIS-based Cable Networks (James Martin, Gongbing Hong and James Westall)
• WQM: An Aggregation-Aware Queue Management Scheme for IEEE 802.11n Based Networks (Ahmad Showail, Kamran Jamshaid and Basem Shihada)

Transport Protocols

• Coupled Congestion Control for RTP Media (Safiqul Islam, Michael Welzl, Stein Gjessing and Naeem Khademi)
• Experimental Evaluation of Multipath TCP Schedulers (Christoph Paasch, Simone Ferlin, Özgü Alay and Olivier Bonaventure)

Mobile Networks

• ConEx Lite for Mobile Networks (Steve Baillargeon and Ingemar Johansson)
• Mobile Network Sharing Between Operators: A Demand Trace-Driven Study (Paolo Di Francesco, Francesco Malandrino and Luiz Dasilva)
• Network Assisted Rate Adaptation for Conversational Video over LTE, Concept and performance evaluation (Ylva Timner, Jonas Pettersson, Hans Hannu, Min Wang and Ingemar Johansson)
• Self-clocked rate adaptation for conversational video in LTE (Ingemar Johansson)
• Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation for Multiple Network Connections: Improving User QoE and Network Usage of YouTube in Mobile Broadband (Florian Wamser, Thomas Zinner, Phuoc Tran-Gia and Jing Zhu)

 

Changing usage behavior, increasing demand for bandwidth as well as a continuous trend towards virtualizing networks and network functions raise questions on how to share limited capacity resources fairly and more efficiently while maintaining the best possible Quality of Experience (QoE) for users. While efficiency is most important when resources are spare, fairness need to be evaluated based on the different quality requirements of the various Internet services that we have today. For example, the Internet, especially the mobile Internet, was mostly engineered to provide a low loss service, low-latency services are not well supported today. In data centers, virtualization and high utilization promise economic benefits. However, effective, yet practical capacity sharing between tenants and applications is an important requirement. This has led to the development of enhancements in capacity sharing, especially congestion control mechanisms — some of these mechanisms are domain-specific, others lend themselves to adoption or generalization for inter-connected networks.

We are running a workshop on Capacity Sharing at SIGCOMM 2014 that invites submissions on these topics.