Archive for the ‘IRTF’ Category
Report from INET4AI Workshop at CoNEXT-2025
Organizers
- Antoine Fressancourt
- Dirk Kutscher
The 1st workshop on Inter-networking challenges for AI (INet4AI), collocated with ACM CoNEXt'25, was held on the 1st of December 2025 in Hong-Kong. The workshop was inspired by ongoing discussion in the IRTF on research challenges for (inter-)networking technologies for AI workloads.
This full day workshop explored some of the networking challenges of large-scale distributed AI workloads in environments, characterized by node and network heterogeneity, as well as dynamically changing resource availability and utilization. During this inaugural edition, researchers from both academia (HKUST, ETH Zurich, Politecnico di Milano, University of Napoli, Tsinghua University, TU Munich) and industry (Huawei, AMD, Microsoft, and others) discussed possible solutions to address the challenges raised by Internet-scale distributed AI systems with four workshop paper presentations and three invited talks. In this report, we will first give a summary of the workshop papers and invited talks. Then we will draw some general remarks regarding the ongoing efforts done in our community to address INet4AI challenges.
Check out the full report.
Program Overview
- Invited talk — Tommaso Bonato — Uno: A One-Stop Solution for Inter- and Intra-Datacenter Congestion Control and Reliable Connectivity — Paper · Slides.
- AI4Net paper — Shaked Leibzirer — Self-supervised Application-level Network Traffic Inversion — Paper · Slides.
- Net4AI paper — German Sviridov — Latency-Optimal Load Balancing For Distributed MoE Inference — Paper.
- Invited talk — Mingxing Zhang — From Homogeneous to Disaggregated Architectures for Large Model Inference — Slides.
- Net4AI paper — Jiaheng Xiong — SCALE-CCL: A Scalable Collective Communication Library for Wide-Area Distributed Training — Paper · Slides.
- Net4AI paper — Giuseppe Aceto — You’ve got a few GPUs, now what?! — Experimenting with a Nano-Cluster for Distributed Training of AI Models — Paper · Slides.
- Invited talk — Wenjia Wei — Debriefing the Open Innovation Platform for UnifiedBus — Slides.
Nominations for ANRP-2026
Submit nominations for the 2026 award period of the Applied Networking Research Prize until November 17, 2025: https://www.irtf.org/anrp/
The Applied Networking Research Prize (ANRP) is awarded to recognise the best recent results in applied networking, interesting new research ideas of potential relevance to the Internet standards community, and upcoming people that are likely to have an impact on Internet standards and technologies, with a particular focus on cases where these people or ideas would not otherwise get much exposure or be able to participate in the discussion.
We encourage nominations of researchers with relevant research results, interesting ideas, and new perspectives. The award will offer them the opportunity to present and discuss their work with the engineers, network operators, policy makers, and scientists that participate in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and its research arm, the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF). Both self- and third-party nominations for this prize are encouraged.
ACM CoNEXT-2025 Workshop on Inter-networking challenges for AI
Generative AI systems are approaching a scalability limit in their development. Due to power density issues, it will soon become infeasible to train large language models with an increasing number of parameters in a single datacenter. While the industry is actively pursuing an effort to scale up AI systems, it becomes necessary to explore the use of scaled-out, global distributed systems to train or serve generative AI models.
Besides, services based on generative AI ask for stringent quality of service levels to meet users demand. Meeting those requirements can be addressed by using systems mixing powerful computing instances residing in cloud platforms with localized edge platforms, using heterogeneous and distributed systems.
Those questions may find a solution in approaches adopted by federated learning systems, in which models are trained among several stakeholders. Yet, those systems also face scalability issues in dealing with models of a larger size.
The ACM CoNEXT INet4AI workshop aims at discussing the networking challenges raised by the distribution of generative AI workloads at a large scale. To that extend, we aim at receiving contributions from academic researchers, machine learning system developers or AI infrastructure providers. .
Submitted papers must be at most six (6) pages long, excluding references and appendices, in two-column 10pt ACM format. Authors of accepted submissions are expected to present and discuss their work at the workshop. All submissions will be peer-reviewed, and the review process will be double-blind. Per the anonymity guidelines, please prepare your paper in a way that preserves the anonymity of the authors. No information will be shared with third parties.
Please submit your paper using the INET4AI Submission Portal: https://inet4ai25.hotcrp.com.
IETF and IRTF Deep-Drive Training in Beijing
I gave a talk about the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) at an IETF Standards Culture and Process Deep-Dive Training that took place in Beijing on May 8th, 2025. The training was hosted by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). My talk explained what the IRTF is, how it works, and how to best contribute to its work.
Resources
Interview on the IETF Blog
The IETF has recently published an interview with me on the IETF Blog.
Appointed as IRTF Chair
I am delighted that I have been appointed as the next Chair of the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB).
I have been involved in the IRTF for many years. It is a unique organization that conducts research of importance to the evolution of the Internet protocols, applications, architecture and technology. It has initiated and supported many important technology developments for the Internet in the past, in fields such as network architecture, security and privacy, congestion control, and many more.
The IRTF focuses on longer term research issues, and its various research groups are enabling international collaboration for continuous research on critical topics for the Internet by working with academic and industry research communities.
My term starts in March 2025. I am sincerely grateful for all the support I have received, I am looking forward to working with this community to help making the Internet work better through good research work.
References
IRTF DINRG Meeting at IETF-121
The IRTF DINRG Meeting at IETF-121 takes place on 2024-11-06 at 13:00 to 14:30 UTC.
| 1 | DINRG Chairs’ Presentation: Status, Updates | Chairs | 05 min |
| 2 | Distributing DDoS Analytics among ASes | Daniel Wagner | 20 min |
| 3 | The Role of DNS names in Internet Decentralization | Tianyuan Yu | 20 min |
| 4 | Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation & Effects of Internet Consolidation | Marc McFadden | 15 min |
| 5 | DINRG – Next Steps | Chairs & Panelists | 30 min |
| 6 | Wrap-up & Buffer | Chairs | 00 min |
Documents and Links to Resources
- United We Stand: Collaborative Detection and Mitigation of
Amplification DDoS Attacks at
Scale - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-mcfadden-consolidation-taxonomy/
- https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-mcfadden-cnsldtn-effects/
Notes
Please remember that all sessions are being recorded.
IRTF ICNRG Meeting at IETF-121
The ICNRG Meeting at IETF-121 takes place on 2024-11-05, 13:00 to 14:30 UTC.
ICNRG Agenda
| 1 | ICNRG Chairs’ Presentation: Status, Updates | Chairs | 05 min |
| 2 | FLIC Update | Marc Mosko | 15 min |
| 3 | CCNx Content Object Chunking | Marc Mosko | 15 min |
| 4 | Reflexive Forwarding Update | Hitoshi Asaeda | 20 min |
| 5 | ICN Challenges for Metaverse Platform Interoperability | Jungha Hong | 15 min |
| 6 | Distributed Micro Service Communication | Aijun Wang | 15 min |
| 7 | Buffer, Wrap Up and Next Steps | Chairs | 05 min |
Please remember that all sessions are being recorded.
Material
- https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-irtf-icnrg-flic/
- https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-mosko-icnrg-ccnxchunking/
- https://github.com/mmosko/ccnpy
- https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-irtf-icnrg-reflexive-forwarding/
- https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-hong-icn-metaverse-interoperability/
- https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-li-icnrg-damc/
New Internet Draft draft-irtf-icnrg-reflexive-forwarding-00
We updated our Internet Draft draft-irtf-icnrg-reflexive-forwarding-00 on Reflexive Forwarding for CCNx and NDN Protocols.
Current Information-Centric Networking protocols such as CCNx and NDN have a wide range of useful applications in content retrieval and other scenarios that depend only on a robust two-way exchange in the form of a request and response (represented by an Interest-Data exchange in the case of the two protocols noted above). A number of important applications however, require placing large amounts of data in the Interest message, and/or more than one two-way handshake. While these can be accomplished using independent Interest-Data exchanges by reversing the roles of consumer and producer, such approaches can be both clumsy for applications and problematic from a state management, congestion control, or security standpoint. This specification proposes a Reflexive Forwarding extension to the CCNx and NDN protocol architectures that eliminates the problems inherent in using independent Interest-Data exchanges for such applications. It updates RFC8569 and RFC8609.
The recent update includes a generalization of the main protocol specification, so that Reflexive Forwarding can be used in both CCNx and NDN.
IRTF DINRG at IETF-120
We have an exciting agenda for our upcoming IRTF DINRG meeting (Wednesday, July 24th, 2024 at 09:30 in Vancouver) at IETF-120. If you do not attend the IETF-120 meeting locally, please consider attending online.
| 1 | DINRG Chairs’ Presentation: Status, Updates | Chairs | 05 min |
| 2 | Exploring Decentralized Digital Identity Protocols | Kaliya Young | 20 min |
| 3 | DNS-Bound Client and Sender Identities | Michael Richardson | 20 min |
| 4 | Internet Fragmentation | Sheetal Kumar | 20 min |
| 5 | SOLID: Your Data, Your Choice | Hadrian Zbarcea | 20 min |
| 6 | Panel discussion: Internet Decentralization – Next Steps | Chairs & Panelists | 30 min |
| 7 | Wrap-up & Buffer | Chairs | 05 min |
Documents and Links to Resources
- Policy Network on Internet
Fragmentation - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-dance-architecture/06/
- https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9518/
- SOLID Project
Panel Description
Internet Decentralization – Next Steps
The previous DINRG meetings all had lively open mic discussions. However we noticed that those spontaneous conversations, while being interesting and insightful, tend to head to different issues in diverse directions. At this meeting we will continue/extend the previous discussions by gathering a small group of panelists and start the discussion with a list of questions collected from the previous meetings. We will have an open mic for all audience and share the list of discussion questions on DINRG list before the meeting; by gathering a panel and preparing a list of questions, we hope to make the discussions more effective and fruitful, moving towards our overarching goal of identifying an ordered list of issues that DINRG aims to address in coming years.