Dirk Kutscher

Dave Ward (Chief Architect at Cisco) gave an interesting lunch talk on the relationship between Open Standards and Open Source Software at IETF-91 today. Technologies such as OpenFlow and NFV are increasingly being advanced through Open Source Software projects that develop both individual components as well as larger systems. The developed artifacts are  sometimes being referred to as de-facto standards.

Dave gave some perspectives on how Open Source Software can help to speed up collaborative technology development and related this to standards work in the IETF and other bodies. Dave emphasized the importance of Open Standards for the development of Internet technologies but he pointed out that Open Standards can leverage Open Source to speed up specification development and to validate architecture and protocol specifications.

The talk suggested embracing Open Source Software development for standards work in the IETF, pointing at new working models and skill sets that were required for that.

Obviously, the IETF has always had a focus on running code for validating specification and several recent efforts have been leveraging OSS succesfully -- for example CORE, DTN and many others. Still, there was agreement that there is room for extending and potentially institutionalizing this.

One of the papers recenty presented at ICN-2014 described an interesting IoT implementation and corresponding experiment with CCN-Lite on the RIOT platform.

Previously, ICN has been perceived as providing conceptual benefits such as

• simplified, natural APIs to developers;
• increased robustness through caching;
• facilitating data fusion through hop-by-hop replication;
• reduced network stack layering; and
• inherent auto-configuration.

The authors describe their implementation of CCN-Lite on RIOT and their approach to realize IoT communication in a 60 node testbed. The idea is to apply Reactive Optimistic Name-based Routing (RONR), i.e., an ICN name-based forwarding approach to send requests for named information in an IoT network using a hybrid flooding/unicast approach.

Some results of their comparison:

• 70% less ROM, 80% less RAM usage by the stack implementation (compared to a RPL/6lowpan implementation);
• 50% reduction of transmitted packets thanks to RONR and ICN caching.

Some pointers for further reading:

•  Emmanuel Baccelli, Christian Mehlis, Oliver Hahm, Thomas C. Schmidt, Matthias Wählisch; Information Centric Networking in the IoT: Experiments with NDN in the Wild; ACM ICN-2014; September 2014; [paper], [presentation]
• CCN-Lite
• RIOT -- the friendly OS for the IoT
• ACM SIGCOMM ICN-2014

Linux Foundation has announced the creation of the  Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) project aiming at accelerating cloud-based delivery models for operators, enable interoperability and accelerate standards through an open source reference implementation.

OPNFV is expected to increase performance and power efficiency; improve reliability, availability and serviceability; and deliver comprehensive platform instrumentation. The initial scope of OPNFV will be on building NFV infrastructure (NFVI) and Virtualized Infrastructure Management (VIM) leveraging existing open source components where possible.

The initial project objectives are to:

• develop an integrated and tested open source platform that can be used to investigate and demonstrate core NFV functionality;
• include proactive participation of leading end users to validate that OPNFV meets the needs of the end user community;
• contribute to and participate in relevant open source projects that will be leveraged in the OPNFV reference platform;
• establish an open ecosystem for NFV solutions based on open standards and open source software; and
• promote OPNFV as the preferred open reference platform.

See the complete press release and the project website.

Four days to go until our first ICN conference!

It's going to be a blast of an event with a high-quality program, tutorials, demos, and panel discusions.

Check out the program: http://conferences2.sigcomm.org/acm-icn/2014/

Hope to see you in Paris at the conference.

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.

We are running a conference on ICN in September 2014!

Some dates of interest:

• May 30, 2014: Paper Submission Deadline
• July 1, 2014: Tutorial and Panel Proposal Deadline
• September 24-26, 2014: Conference

More information: http://conferences2.sigcomm.org/acm-icn/2014/index.php

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/