We are organizing the 2025 HKUST Internet Research Workshop (HKIRW) in the week before the IETF-122 meeting in Bangkok. This workshop aims to bring together researchers in computer networking and systems around the globe to a live forum discussing innovative ideas at their early stages. The mission of the workshop is that promising but not-yet-mature ideas can receive timely feedback from the community and experienced researchers, leading them into future IRTF work, Internet Drafts, or IETF working groups.

The workshop will operate like a “one day Dagstuhl seminar” and will focus on discussion and ideas exchange and less on conference-style presentations. The objective is to identify topics and connect like-minded people for potential future collaboration.

Please see https://hkirw.github.io/2025/ for details.

References

• Workshop homepage
• Report from HKIRW-2024

On Monday, December 9th, 2024, we held our Decentralization of the Internet (DIN) workshop at ACM CoNEXT-2024. It brought together network researchers, law and policy experts, and digital right activists to discuss the observed consolidation and centralization of the existing Internet applications, services, and the infrastructure in recent years. This trend has economic as well as technical implications for attributes commonly associated with the Internet, such as user-centricity and permissionless innovations.

The Decentralization of the Internet Research Group (DINRG) of the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) has been working on identifying the root causes and consequences of Internet centralization at IETF meetings and focused workshops in the past, which has led to significant insights, especially with regard to the centralization of infrastructure and control power. This recent DIN workshop at ACM CoNEXT-2024, organized by my DINRG co-chairs Lixia Zhang and myself, provided a forum for academic researchers to present and discuss on-going efforts on this topic, and to create a greater awareness of this important issue in the broader network research community. The workshop attracted a diverse set of researchers who are working on Internet decentralization in fields such as Internet technologies, economics and law-making. The workshop featured two keynotes, two technical paper presentation sessions, and an interactive panel discussion.

Keynotes

The keynotes were presented by two renowned experts:

Keynote: Cory Doctorow: DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!

Cory Doctorow, member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), gave a talk titled DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How computer scientists can halt enshittification to make a new, good internet and condemn today's enshitternet to the scrapheap of history. Cory’s talk vividly explained the historic development of a process that he called enshittification, a process in which the providers of online products and services changed their policies subtly and gradually over time, grabbing the control of user data for profitability. Doctorow also discussed potential remedies and countermeasures, including removing the barriers for users to exit platforms and reinstalling the end-to-end principle in future application developments.

Keynote: Michael Karanicolas: The Fediverse Papers: Constitutional, Governance, and Policy Questions for a New Paradigm of Networking

Michael Karanicolas, the executive director of the UCLA Institute for Technology, Law and Policy, talked about the Fediverse Papers: Constitutional, Governance, and Policy Questions for a New Paradigm of Networking. Michael provided an overview of the history of digital speech and content governance. He highlighted the challenges in supporting effective content moderation in today’s Internet contexts, including issues around monetization, legislation, privacy, and the need for governance mechanisms to meet users, content owners, and governments’ expectations. He emphasized the importance of intentionality and a structured process to identify the essential policy questions and to evaluate various design choices for the future of decentralized platforms.

Decentralized Systems

Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media

Authors: Martin Kleppmann, Paul Frazee, Jake Gold, Jay Graber, Daniel Holmgren, Devin Ivy, Jeromy Johnson, Bryan Newbold, Jaz Volpert

Abstract: Bluesky is a new social network built upon the AT Protocol, a decentralized foundation for public social media. It was launched in private beta in February 2023, and has grown to over 10 million registered users by October 2024. In this paper we introduce the architecture of Bluesky and the AT Protocol, and explain how the technical design of Bluesky is informed by our goals: to enable decentralization by having multiple interoperable providers for every part of the system; to make it easy for users to switch providers; to give users agency over the content they see; and to provide a simple user experience that does not burden users with complexity arising from the system’s decentralized nature. The system’s openness allows anybody to contribute to content moderation and community management, and we invite the research community to use Bluesky as a dataset and testing ground for new approaches in social media moderation.

ReP2P Matrix: Decentralized Relays to Improve Reliability and Performance of Peer-to-Peer Matrix

Authors: Benjamin Schichtholz, Roland Bless, Florian Jacob, Hannes Hartenstein, Martina Zitterbart

Abstract: Matrix is a decentralized middleware for low-latency group communication, most renowned for its use in the Element instant messenger. Proposals for peer-to-peer (P2P) Matrix architectures aim to decentralize the current architecture further, which is based on federated servers. These proposals require that the receiver and the originator, or another peer that already successfully received the message, are simultaneously online. We introduce relay-enhanced P2P Matrix (ReP2P Matrix) in order to improve message delivery between peers that are online at different times. The design maintains the advantages of P2P Matrix and integrates well into it, e.g., it reuses existing mechanisms for authentication and authorization. Using an extended real-world group messaging traffic dataset, we evaluate P2P Matrix by comparing it to P2P Matrix without relays. The results show that relays do not only improve reliability in message delivery, but also increase the share of low delivery latencies by 50% points in groups with up to 30 members.

On Empowering End Users in Future Networking

Authors: Tianyuan Yu, Xinyu Ma, Lixia Zhang

Abstract: In today's Internet, end users communicate largely via cloud-based apps, and user data are stored in cloud servers and controlled by cloud providers. Recent years have witnessed multiple efforts in developing decentralized social apps with various design approaches, although the community at large is yet to fully understand the effectiveness, viability, and limitations of these different designs. In this paper, we make a proposition that a necessary condition of moving towards Internet decentralization is enabling direct user-to-user (U2U) communications, and discuss the design choices in several decentralization efforts and identify their limitations. We then articulate why a DNS-derived namespace is the best choice in U2U app developments in general, and use a recently developed decentralized app, NDN Workspace (NWS), as an example to show how NWS' use of DNS-derived namespace enables secure U2U communications.

Technologies for Decentralization

Atomicity and Abstraction for Multi-Blockchain Interactions

Authors: Huaixi Lu, Akshay Jajoo, Kedar S. Namjoshi

Abstract: A blockchain enables secure, atomic transactions among untrusted parties. Atomicity is not guaranteed, however, for transactions whose operations span several blockchains; multi-chain atomicity must be enforced by a protocol. Such protocols are known only for special cases, such as cryptocurrency swaps, which are limited only to two chains. We propose a novel two-phase protocol that facilitates atomic executions of general multi-chain (>= 2) transactions. We formally analyze the protocol correctness and show that the proposed abstraction considerably simplifies the development of multi-chain applications. Our experiments with a prototype implementation show that the performance of the general atomicity protocol is comparable to that of custom-built implementations.

Communication Cost for Permissionless Distributed Consensus at Internet Scale

Authors: David Guzman, Dirk Trossen, Jörg Ott

Abstract: The diffusion of information that evolves a distributed computing state is a fundamental operation of a permissionless distributed consensus system (DCS). This permissionless participation decentralized the consensus over the distributed computing state, e.g., in cryptocurrencies and voting systems. For this, a permissionless DCS implements protocols to establish relationships among peers, which is then used to diffuse information. The relation establishment constitutes the control plane of the DCS, while the state diffusion is the data plane. The prevalent mechanism to realize both is a randomized peer-centric iterative diffusion. In this paper, we contrast this approach against a multicast-based design, focusing our comparison on the costs (bytes transmitted) for maintaining the relations, the control plane. We develop suitable models to account for those costs, parameterized through Internet-scale experimental insights we derived from existing DCS deployments. Our results show that the communication costs can be reduced by 30 times.

Towards a Decentralized Internet Namespace

Authors: Yekta Kocaogullar, Eric Osterweil, Lixia Zhang

Abstract: The Domain Name System (DNS) has been providing a decentralized global namespace to support all Internet applications and usages over the last few decades. In the recent years, a number of blockchain-based name systems have emerged with the claim of providing better namespace decentralization than DNS. The community at large seems uncertain with regard to which of these systems is the best in providing decentralized Internet namespace control. In this paper, we first deconstruct the design of DNS, identify its three essential components and explain who controls each of them. We then examine the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) as a representative example of blockchain-based naming systems, gauge the degree of its decentralization. Finally, we conduct a comparative analysis between DNS and ENS to assess the validity and affordability of each design and the (de)centralization in their namespace control and name system operations.

Panel Discussion: Decentralization of the Internet – Quo Vadis?

An interactive panel discussion with (from left to right) Michael Karanicolas (UCLA), Paul Mockapetris (ThreatSTOP), Dan Massey (USC ISI, NSF), and Cory Doctorow (EFF), articulated various next steps for countering Internet centralization. Among many things discussed, the panel and audience identified the notion of enabling direct user-to-user communication without reliance on third parties, and the required functionality to support that, such as how to provide user owned identities, tools for user mutual authentications and secure communications.

These and additional related topics will be further discussed at the IRTF DIN research group, which is a forum with open participation to serve the purpose of continuous international collaborative research on Internet decentralization.

References

• Workshop homepage at ACM CoNEXT-2024
• Workshop papers
• Workshop videos
• IETF blog post on the workshop
• IRTF DINRG

Sponsors

Recent years have witnessed the consolidation and centralization of the Internet applications, services, as well as the infrastructure. This centralization has economic aspects and factors as well as technical ones. The effects are often characterized as detrimental to the original goals of the Internet, such as permissionless innovation, as well as to society at large, due to the amount of (personal) data that is obtained and capitalized on by large platforms.

We are organizing a workshop at ACM CoNEXT-2024 to provide a forum for academic researchers to present and discuss on-going work on this topic and to create greater awareness in the larger community for this topic. The workshop would solicit work on specific topics including but not limited to:

• investigation of the root causes of Internet centralization, and articulation of the impacts of the market economy, architecture and protocol designs, as well as government regulations;
• measurement of the Internet centralization and the consequential societal impacts;
• characterization and assessment of observed Internet centralization;
• new research topics and technical solutions for decentralized system and application development;
• decentralized (cloud-independent) distributed system design;
• protocols and algorithms for decentralized distributed systems; and
• decentralized security and trust architectures and protocols for real-world Internet systems.

Submission Instructions

Please see the workshop homepage for details.

On March 15 2024, in the week before the IETF-119 meeting in Brisbane, Zili Meng and I organized the 1st HKUST Internet Research Workshop that brought together researchers in computer networking and systems around the globe to a live forum discussing innovative ideas at their early stages. The workshop took place at HKUST's Clear Water Bay campus in Hong Hong.

We ran the workshop like a “one day Dagstuhl seminar” and focused on discussion and ideas exchange and less on conference-style presentations. The objective was to identify topics and connect like-minded people for potential future collaboration, which worked out really well.

The agenda was:

1. Dirk Kutscher: Networking for Distributed ML
2. Zili Meng: Overview of the Low-Latency Video Delivery Pipeline
3. Jianfei He: The philosophy behind computer networking
4. Carsten Bormann: Towards a device-infrastructure continuum in IoT and OT networks
5. Zili Meng: Network Research – Academia, Industry, or Both?

Dirk Kutscher: Networking for Distributed ML

With the ever-increasing demand for compute power from large-scale machine learning training we have started to realize that not only does Moore's Law no longer address increasing performance demand automatically, but also that the growth rate in terms of training FLOPs for transformers and other large-scale machine learning exhibits by far larger exponential factors.

This has been well illustrated by presentations in an AI data center side meeting at IETF-118, for example by Omer Shabtai who talked about Distributed Training in data centers.

WIth increasing scale, communication over networks becomes a bottleneck, and the question arises, what could be good system designs, protocols, and in-network support strategies to improve performance.

Current distributed machine learning systems typically use a technology called Collective Communication that was developed as a Message Passing Interface (MPI) abstraction for high-performance computing (HPC). Collective Communication is the combination of standardized aggregration and reduction function with communication abstractions, e.g., for "broadcasting" or "unicasting" results.

Collective Communication is implemented a few popular libraries such as OpenMPI and Nvidia's NCCL. When used in IP networks, the communication is usually mapped to iterations of peer-to-peer interactions, e.g., organizing nodes in a ring and sending data for aggregation within such rings. One potential way to achieve better performance would be to perform the aggregation "in the network", as in HPC systems, e.g., using the Scalable hierarchical aggregation protocol (SHArP). Previous work has attempted doing this with P4-based dataplane programming, however such approaches are typically limited due to the mostly stateless operation of the corresponding network elements.

In large-scale training sessions, running over shared infrastructure in multi-tenant data centers, communication needs to respond to congestion, packet loss, server overload etc., i.e., the features of typical transport protocols are needed.

I had previously discussed corresponding challenges and requirements in these Internet Drafts:

• Collective Communication Optimization
• Towards a Unified Transport Protocol for In-Network Computing in Support of RPC-based Applications

In my talk at HKIRW, I discussed ideas for corresponding transport protocols. There are interesting challenges in bringing together reliable communication, congestion control, flow control, single-destination as well multi-destination communication and in-network processing.

Zili Meng: Overview of the Low-Latency Video Delivery Pipeline

Zili talked about requirements for ultra-low latency for interactive streaming for the next-generation of immersive applications. Some application provide really stringent low-latency requirements, with a consistent service quality over many hours, and the talk suggested a better coordination between all elements of the streaming and rendering pipeline.

There was a discussion as to how achievable these requirements are in the Internet and whether applications might be re-designed in terms of providing acceptable user experience even without guaranteed high-bandwidth low-latency service, for example by employing technologies such as semantic communication, prediction, local control loops etc.

Jianfei He: The philosophy behind computer networking

In his talk, Jianfe He asked the question how the field of computer networked can be more precisely defined and how a more systematic could help with the understanding and design of future networked systems.

Specifically, he suggested considering basing design on a solid understanding of potentials and absolute constraints in a certain field, such as Shannon's theory/limit and on the notion of tradeoffs, i.e., consequences of certain design decisions, as represented by the CAP theorem in distributed systems. He mentioned two examples: 1) routing protocols and 2) transport protocols.

For routing protocols, there are well-known tradeoffs between convergence time, scaling limits, and required bandwidths. With changed network properties (bandwidth) – can we reasons about options for shifting the tradeoffs?

For transport protocols, there a goals such as reliability, congestion control etc., and tradeoff relationships between packet loss, line utilization, delay and buffer size. How would designs change if we changed the objective, e.g., to shortest flow completion times or shortest message completion time (or if we looked at collections of flows)? What if we added fairness to these objectives?

Jianfe asked the question whether it was possible to develop these tradeoffs/constraints into a more consistent theory.

Carsten Bormann: Towards a device-infrastructure continuum in IoT and OT networks

Carsten talked about requirements and available technologies for providing a secure management of IoT devices in a device-infrastructure continuum in IoT and OT networks, where scale demands high degrees of automation at run-time and only limited individual device configuration (at installation only). It is no longer possible to manually track each new "Thing" species.

Carsten mentioned technologies such as

• RFC 8250: Manufacturer's Usage Description (MUD);
• W3C Web of Things description model; and
• IETF Semantic Definition Format (SDF).

In his talk, Carsten formulated the goal of "Well-Informed Networking", i.e., an approach where networks can obtain sufficient information about the existing devices, their legitimate communication requirements, and their current status (device health).

Zili Meng: Network Research – Academia, Industry, or Both?

Zili discussed the significance of consistently high numbers industry and industry-only papers at major networking conferences. Often such papers are based on operational experience that can only obtained by companies actually operating corresponding systems.

Sometimes papers seem to get accepted not necessarily on the basis of their technical merits but because they report on "large-scale deployments".

When academics get involved in such work, it is often not in a driving position, but rather through students who work in internship at corresponding companies. Naturally, such papers are not questioning the status quo and are generally not critical of the systems they discuss.

At the workshop, we discussed the changes in the networking research field over the past years, as well as the challenges of successful collaborations between academia and industry.

IEEE MetaCom Workshop on Decentralized, Data-Oriented Networking for the Metaverse (DORM)

Workshop page at IEEE MetaCom

Organizers

• Jeff Burke, UCLA
• Dirk Kutscher, HKUST(GZ)
• Dave Oran, Network Systems Research & Design
• Lixia Zhang, UCLA

Workshop Description

The DORM workshop is a forum to explore new directions and early research results on Metaverse system architecture, protocols, and security, along a data-oriented design direction that can encourage and facilitate decentralized realizations. Here we broadly interpret the phrase “Metaverse” as a new phase of networking with multi-dimensional shared views in open realms.

Most prototype implementations of such systems today replicate the social media platform model: they run on cloud servers offered by a small number of providers, and have identities and trust management anchored at these servers. Consequently, all communications are mediated through such servers, together with extensive CDN overlay infrastructures or the equivalent.

Although the cloud services may be extended to edges to address performance and delay issues, the centralization of control power that stems from this cloud-centric approach can be problematic from a societal perspective. It also reflects a significant semantic mismatch between the existing address-based network support and many aspirations for open realm applications and interoperability: the applications, by and large, operate on named data principles at the application layer, but need to deploy multiple layers of middleware services, which are provider-specific, to bridge the gap. These added complexities prohibit new ways of interacting (leveraging new data formats such as USD and gITF) and are not conducive to flexible distributed computing in the edge-to-cloud continuum.

This workshop solicits efforts that explore new directions in metaverse realization and work that takes a principled approach to key topics in the areas of 1) Networking as the Platform, 2) Objects and Experiences, and 3) Trust and Transactions without being constrained by inherited platforms.

Networking as the Platform

Metaverse systems will rely on a variety of communication patterns such as client-server RPC, massively scalable multi-destination communication, publish-subscribe etc. In systems that are designed with a cloud-based, centralized architecture in mind, such interactions are typically mediated by central servers and supported by overlay CDN infrastructure, with operational inflexibility and lacking optimization mechanisms, for example in order to leverage specific network link layer capabilities such as broadcast/multicast features. Underlying reliance on existing stacks also introduces familiar complications in providing disruption-tolerant, mobile-friendly extended reality applications, limiting their viability for eventual use in critical infrastructure and require significant engineering support to use in demanding entertainment applications, such as large-scale live events.

This workshop seeks research on new strategies for Metaverse system design that can promote innovation by lowering barriers to entry for new applications that perform robustly under a variety of conditions. We solicit research on Metaverse system design that addresses architectural and protocol-level issues without the reliance on a centralized cloud-based architecture. Instead, we expect the DORM workshop submissions to start with a distributed system assumption, focusing on individual protocol and security elements that enable decentralized Metaverse realizations.

Many Metaverse-relevant interactions such as video streaming and distribution of event data today inherently rely on abstractions for accessing named data objects such as video chunks, for example in DASH-based video streaming. The DORM workshop will therefore particularly invite contributions that explore new systems and protocol designs that leverage that principle, thus exploring new opportunities to re-imagine the relationship between application/network and link/physical layer protocols in order to better support Metaverse system implementations. This could include work on new hypermedia concepts based on the named data principle and cross-layer designs for simplifying and optimizing the implementation and operation of such protocols.

We expect such systems to as well be better suited to elegant, efficient integration of computing into the network, thus providing more flexible and adaptive platforms for offloading computation and supporting more elaborate data dissemination strategies.

From Objects to Experiences

In our perceived Metaverse/open realm systems, there are different existing and emerging media representations and encodings such as current video encodings as well as scene and 3D object description and transmission formats such as USD and glTF. Similar to previous developments in the networked audio/video area, it is interesting to investigate opportunities for new scene and 3D object representation formats that are suitable not only for efficient creation and file-like unidirectional transmission but also for streaming, granular composition and access, de-structuring, efficient multi-destination transmission, possibly using network coding techniques.

The workshop is therefore soliciting contributions that explore a holistic approach to media/object representation within network/distributed computing, enabling better performance, composability and robustness of future distributed Metaverse systems. Submissions that explore cross-layer approaches to supporting emerging media types such as volumetric video and neural network codecs are encouraged, as are considerations of how code implementing object behaviors and interactions can be supported - providing a path to the interoperable experiences expressed in various Metaverse visions.

Trust and Transactions

Finally, distributed open realm systems need innovative solutions in identity management and security support that enable interoperation among multiple systems including a diverse population of users. We note that mechanisms to support trust are inherently coupled with various identities, from "real world" identities to application-specific identities that users may adopt in different contexts. Proposed solutions need to consider not just media asset exchange but also the interactions among objects, and the data flows needed to support it.

The workshop solicits contributions that identify specific technical challenges, for example system bootstrapping, trust establishment, authenticated information discovery, and that propose new approaches to the identified challenges. Researchers are encouraged to consider cross-layer designs that address disconnects between layers of trust in many current systems - e.g., the reliance on third-party certificate authorities for authentications, the inherent trust in connections rather than the objects themselves, that tends to generate brittleness for even local communications if connectivity to the global network is compromised.

Call for Papers

The Decentralized Data-Oriented Networking for the Metaverse (DORM) workshop is intended as a forum to explore new directions and early research results on the system architecture, protocols, and security to support Metaverse applications, focusing on data-oriented, decentralized system designs. We view Metaverse as a new phase of networking with multi-dimensional shared views in open realms.

Most Metaverse systems today replicate the social media platform model, i.e., they assume a cloud platform provider-based system architecture where identities and the trust among them is anchored via a centralized administrative structure and where communication is mediated through servers and an extensive CDN overlay infrastructure operated by that administration. The centralization that stems from this approach can be problematic both from a control and from a performance & efficiency perspective. Despite operating on named data principles conceptually, such systems typically exhibit traditional layering approaches that prohibit new ways of interacting (leveraging new data formats such as USD and gITF) and that are not conducive for flexible distributed computing in the edge-to-cloud continuum.

This workshop solicits work that takes a principled approach at key research topics in the areas of 1) Networking as the Platform, 2) Objects and Experiences, and 3) Trust and Transactions without being constrained by inherited platform designs, including but no limited to:

• Distributed Metaverse architectures
• Computing in the network as an integral component for better communication and interaction support
• Application-layer protocols for a rich set of interaction styles in open realms
• Supporting Metaverse via data-oriented techniques
• Security, Privacy and Identity Management in Metaverse systems
• New concepts for improved network support for Metaverse systems, e.g., through facilitating ubiquitous multipath forwarding and multi-destination delivery
• Cross-layer designs
• Emerging scene description and media formats
• Quality of Experience for Metaverse applications
• Distributed consensus and state synchronization
• Security, Privacy and Identity Management in Metaverse systems

Given the breadth and emerging nature of the field, all papers should include the articulation of a specific vision of Metaverse that provides clarifying assumptions for the technical content.

Submissions and Formatting

The workshop invites submission of manuscripts with early and original research results that have not been previously published or posted on public websites or that are not currently under review by another conference or journal. Submitted manuscripts must be prepared according to IEEE Computer Society Proceedings Format (double column, 10pt font, letter paper) and submitted in the PDF format. The manuscript submitted for review should be no longer than 6 pages without references. Reviewing will be double-blind. Submissions must not reveal the authors’ names and their affiliations and avoid obvious self-references. Accepted and presented papers will be published in the IEEE MetaCom 2023 Conference Proceedings and included in IEEE Xplore.

Manuscript templates can be found here. All submissions to IEEE MetaCom 2023 must be uploaded to EasyChair at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=metacom2023.

Organization Committee

• Jeff Burke, UCLA
• Dirk Kutscher, HKUST(GZ)
• Dave Oran, Network Systems Research & Design
• Lixia Zhang, UCLA

Technical Program Committee

• Alex Afanasyev, Florida International University
• Hitoshi Asaeda, NICT
• Ali Begen, Ozyegin University
• Taejoong Chung, Virginia Tech
• Serge Fdida, Sorbonne University Paris
• Carlos Guimarães, ZettaScale Technology SARL
• Peter Gusav, UCLA
• Toru Hasagawa, Osaka University
• Jungha Hong, ETRI
• Kenji Kanai, Waseda University
• Ruidong Li, Kanazawa University
• Spyridon Mastorakis, University of Nebraska Omaha
• Kazuhisa Matsuzono, NICT
• Marie-Jose Montpetit, Concordia University Montreal
• Jörg Ott, Technical University Munich
• Yiannis Psarras, Protocol Labs
• Eve Schooler, Intel
• Tian Song, Beijing Institute of Technology
• Kazuaki Ueda, KDDI Research
• Cedric Westphal, Futurewei
• Edmund Yeh, Northeastern University
• Jiadong Yu, HKUST(GZ)
• Yu Zhang, Harbin Institute of Technology

Important Dates

• March 20, 2023, Paper submission deadline
• April 20, 2023 Notification of paper acceptance
• May 10, 2023, Camera-ready paper submissions

Submission Link

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=metacom2023

Edge- and, more generally, in-network computing is receiving a lot attention in research and industry fora. The ability to decentralize computing, to achieve low latency communication to distributed application logic, and the potential for privacy-preserving analytics are just a few examples that motivate a new approach for looking at computing and networking.

What are the interesting research questions from a networking and distributed computing perspective? In-network computing can be conceived in many different ways – from active networking, data plane programmability, running virtualized functions, service chaining, to distributed computing. What abstractions do we need to program, optimize, and to manage such systems? What is the relationship to cloud networking?

These questions will be discussed at the first workshop on Emerging In-Network Computing (ENCP) that takes place at ACM CoNEXT-2019 on December 9th in Orlando.

We have received many interesting submission and were able to put together a really interesting program that covers both Network Programmability and In-Network Computing Architectures and Protocols. Check out the full program here.

Many thanks to my co-organizers Spyros Mastorakis and Abderrahmen Mtibaa, to our steering committee members Jon Crowcroft, Satyajayant (Jay) Misra, and Dave Oran, and to our great Technical Program Committee for putting this together.

Links

• 1st ACM CoNEXT ENCP-2019 workshop
• Compute First Networking (CFN): Distributed Computing meets ICN
• Proposed IRTF Research Group on Computing in the Networking (COINRG)

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.

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/

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