Blog of Random Thoughts and Pictures

Open Source SDN projects to keep an eye on

August 5th, 2012

Open Source SDN Projects to Keep Your Eyes On from SDNCentral – although there’s not one EU originated project to be seen yet.

Openflow SDN limitations

July 7th, 2012

Here’s an interesting analysis of how were OpenFlow/SDN is Not a Silver Bullet for Network Scalability

How To Predict a Technology Future

June 24th, 2012

Here’s a sample method to help predict some technology futures.

http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2012/06/how-to-predict-the-future.html

The Internet is reaching its overload limit

May 25th, 2011

In the build up to the Irish Future Internet Forum 2011 I was asked to say a few words and is what popped out The internet is reaching its overload limit via the Siliconrepublic.com

7th concerntation meeting of Future Networks

February 11th, 2011

This entry is cross posted from my TSSG blog.

Okay time is not being kind to me especially when it comes to completing entries for this blog and while February 2011 is already a lifetime away, but given that I was in Brussels directly after the FIRE workshop, I’d like to report on my attendance at the 7th concerntation meeting of Future Networks.

The main part of the plenary was given over to description of Future Networks research towards standardisation activities. The last part of the session was given over to future research topics in the area as identified by Net!Works, ISI, EIFFEL, NEWCOMM++, BINE and EURO-NF. All presentations can be seen off this link.

The second day of this meeting was split into a number of separate plenaries as the Network of the Future projects are organised into three clusters: Future Internet Technologies (FI Cluster), Radio Access and Spectrum (RAS Cluster) and Converged and Optical Networks (CaON Cluster). I attended the FI Cluster, the agenda and presentations of which you can see off of this link.

There were a number of presentation on the economic and user perspective of Inter-ISP traffic optimization, where ETICS, IBBT, SESERV and SMOOTH-IT made presentations on the matter.

I was quite interested in the session on Information and Execution Automation between the Service and Network planes where GEYSERS, MEDIEVAL, ONE, ONEFIT and  UNIVERSELF gave their view points, however I was left a little perplexed that there was no real concensus on the topic and no plan to reach one.

Okay only a few words it really shouldn’t have taken me this long to post it
, but I hope this gives you a quick overview of the EU activities in the area of the Future Internet, with the next big event FIA Budapest in May.

FIRE open call, mini call, whatyamacall

February 9th, 2011

This entry is cross posted from my TSSG blog.

Having finished up the SFI FI workshop, I had a little time to kill before an early flight to Brussels so I stayed in Dublin and headed for Landsdowne Road (Aviva Stadium) and the Ireland V Wales friendly. It was a cold-wet night, with not that many fans about, with it only livened up by a fantastic goal by Darron Gibson.

Anyway to day one of a 3 day trip to Brussels, I headed for Etterbeck and the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (VUB) campus for the FIRE open call information day. Firstly there was a slight route optimization problem with getting to VUB from the airport but a train, metro, bus combination eventually got me there. Then comes the maze that is VUB really even with new signs the place is hard to navigate but lucky enough a memory of a Living Labs & Open Innovation event in 2007 got me to the right building location and room.

The information day was an opportunity to see how to submit proposals for the open calls launched by the BonFIRE, OFELIA, and TEFIS projects.

BonFIRE was up first up giving an overview of how it targets the Internet of Services and Future Networks research communities with it’s text bed infrastructure and in particular highlighting its multi-cloud facility and sophisticated network emulation [pdf].

Next up the TEFIS project gave an overview of their interdisciplinary infrastructure which has various testbed resources such as new network paradigms, cloud computing, advanced user interface for services [pdf].

Finally of most interest to me was the OpenFlow based testbed OFELIA which provides a platform for experimentation of novel networking protocols, addressing schemes and applications in the Internet [pdf].

Lunch was extracted form one of the biggest soup vats I’ve ever seen and then afterwards everyone headed over to Plienan 2 for more in-depth sessions with the project participants.

I headed for the OFELIA session which seemed to have the smallest room allocation and the largest number of participants. Further details on the open call process were provided which makes it sounds like a mini FP7 project proposal. I must say I feel for Hagan the coordinator as it doesn’t sound like an easy call to manage.

The last part of the session was the best as people pitched potential projects that could fit into the call and the project partners around the table offered their thoughts and advise in regards to the suitability of the proposal.

So that’s the FIRE open call day, I’ll complete a separate entry for the other two days in Brussels which was for the 7th FP7 Future Networks concentration meeting.

SFI Future Internet workshop

February 8th, 2011

This entry is cross posted from my TSSG blog.

I have found it hard to keep a handle on all the Internet based research happening in Ireland so I jumped at the chance to participate in the recent SFI workshop on the Future Internet. It proved to be a fantastic opportunity to catch up with old aquaintancies and to meet some new researchers in the field.

Now the topic line is a little controversial in that the term Future Internet now means many things to many people however what’s good about the term is that it can act as a nice umbrella term to capture the massive shift in Internet research which is looking for new ways to move, share, find, define and create digital information. Whether this information is for use in Education, Health , Finance Marine or even Agricultural services it was great to see the wealth of situations to which Irish research was being applied to.

To set the context for day early presentations in the workshop highlighted the meaning of the future Internet, the new architectures being discussed at the EU level and some perspectives on the European Future Internet Assembly.

I gave an overview presentaion on this topic, and my slides can be seen here.

Then in ernest a volley of 10 minute presentations were given by

  • Willie Donnelly on “Why the Future Internet?”
  • Stefan Decker on “From Linked Data to Networked Knowledge” and “Real-World Internet (FIA)”.
  • John Kennedy on the “Future Internet – An Intel Perspective”.
  • Pol Mac Aonghusa on “IBM Smart Cities”.
  • John Holland on the “Ericsson view”.
  • Keith Griffin on the “Cisco view”.
  • Fergal Ward on the “Intune view”.
  • Barry Smyth on “The Sensor Web”.
  • Ronan Farrell on the “CTVR Future Internet activities”.
  • Mike Hinchey on “Lero and FI”.
  • Barry O’Sullivan on “4C Future Internet activities”.
  • Steve Gotz on “CNGL and FI”.
  • Padraig Cunningham on “Clique and FI”.
  • Martin Johnsson on “FAME and FI”.
  • David Malone on th “Hamilton Institute Future Internet activities”.
  • Brendan Jennings on “FI Dagstuhl 2011”.

All the slides can be picked up off this SFI FI workshop page.

I found the format perfect 10 mins meant people had to get to point quickly while at the same time give an impression of the depth of research and it has to be said some very interesting solutions are being investigated in Irish research organisations.

Next up was a presentation by the Marine Institute with some use cases to which only Future Internet technologies could be applied. What followed was some discussion on other use cases which would be applicable, and I gave a presentation on upcoming FI PPP use case.

I usually find that the next steps for this type of event are left hanging in the wind however in this case it couldn’t be further from the truth as plans are now afoot for a broader workshop to take place in Q2 of 2011.

FIA Ghent and the PII Future Internet award

December 17th, 2010

This entry is cross posted from my TSSG blog.

So with the Pouzin Society meeting coming to a close I took the short train ride over to Ghent for the FIA activities. The assembly is quite big now as compared to FIA Madrid and there were tons of interesting sessions however I spent most of my time in the FIA session II: Smart Infrastructures and FIA session V: Architecture Group.

Three particular items caught my eye “Programmability of the Infrastructure – CHANGE project” and “Resilience in Networks: Elements and Approach for a Trustworthy Infrastructure – ResumeNet project” and the follow up activities of the FI Arch group (on the current internet limitations document [pdf])

Then came the great news that Panlab II had won the Future Internet prize for the best European Future Internet initiative. Wow a great success for the PII team, and especially those in the TSSG which included Eamonn, Shane and Zohra.

Their work focused on PII resource repository, which was implemented using a REST style architecture, the full design of which can be seen below.

The PII Repository Data Model was defined by two data models
* Core Data Model
* Test Suite Data Model

The list of deliverables capturing this work include:
D3.1 System Analysis where a list of the Panlab Community testbeds are maintained and the resources from those testbeds providing PII components are described in UML [pdf].

D3.2 Testbed Service Description Specification in which the specification of the service description system is given. Also requirements are broken down into more refined technical requirements for the specification of the PII testbed services description system [pdf].

D3.7 Implementation Report in which the Service Description, Service Discovery and Service Orchestration of the PII testbed is given. This document also reports on the extensive implementation efforts realised by WP3 PII partners delivering a functional PII framework [pdf].

D4.2 Monitoring requirements and procedures for service level agreement compliance has the functional specification of PII’s quality assurance framework, which hosts the metrics and processes for quality assurance in the PII framework [pdf].

And finally their paper
Eamonn Power, Zohra Boudjemil and Shane Fox. Architecture and Implementation of a Testbeds Repository [pdf]. International Conference on Telecommunications and Multimedia (TEMU) 2010, Chania, Crete, Greece, July 2010.

I’m delighted to see that Eamonn, Shane’s and Zohra’s work has been recognised.

EU – Japan Symposium on Future Internet and New Generation Networks

October 22nd, 2010

This entry is cross posted to my TSSG blog.

Directly from finishing my open source session at the 6th Future Networks concertation meeting I headed for the Brussels airport to catch a flight to Tampere, Finland (via Stockholm) for the 3rd EU-Japan Symposium on Future Internet and New Generation Networks.
The flight was easy going, and the stop off in Stockholm was nice as I got to watch some Champions League football and then relax a little in the Starbucks cafe, catching up on some emails.

Tampere is the third largest city in Finland, and the scene for a number of technological innovations, I was told the first test GSM calls were made here. The actual hotel / conference location was set in a picturesque location by a lake.

Tampere outskirts

The event itself started with some high level presentations on EU Digital Policy, the Digital Agenda for Europe and the ICT Paradigm Shift in this decade. I found the presentation Masahiko Tominaga, Vice President, NICT on NwGN R&D Strategy [pdf] the most interesting of these.

On the next break, it was great to get the opportunity to share lunch with Sasi. Now I know Sasi normally only sits a couple of floors away from me, but it’s times like this we really get a chance to discuss at length a whole miriad of topics.

After lunch the event was broken up into sepereate Tracks and I headed for Internet/Network Architectures session. Sasi presented on the emerging generation of symbiotic networks: Federated Communication Systems [pdf] while I took the opportunity to present on RINA, the Recursive Inter Network Architecture, which is based on the work originated by John Day.

What I took from the whole session was the interesting work of Takeshi Usui (NICT/KDDI Laboratories) on the Virtual Network Mobility:Advanced Mobility Management over Network Virtualization [pdf] and Nao Kawanishi (ATR) on his vision of An Open Mobile Communication System with All Strata Virtualization [pdf].

I was pleasantly surprised by the symposium and people I meet at this event and the first sign of snow, which made the long trip back, via bus to Helsinki and then plane via London Heathrow and onto Dublin a worthwhile one.

Looking back on a project that is 4WARD

September 6th, 2010

The ICT 4WARD project has come to a close and it’s time to reflect on what was been billed as a clean slate project which was to combine sets of radical architectural approaches towards the future Internet, building on a strong mobile and wireless background to design inter-operable and complementary families of network architectures.

4WARD was my first project in the FP7 programme, and was quite different from the FP6 projects that I participated in, FP7 has been an interesting experience to say the least! Work on the proposal started in the summer of 2006, and took 8 months to complete, and then another 8 months were taken with its review and contract negoations with the project itself starting in ernest on Janurary 1st 2008.
30 months later, after 7 project meetings stretching from Lisbon to Stockholm and in excess of 32,000km travelled, upteen conference calls and many many more wiki updates, I come to the end of 4WARD.
Well I have to say I worked with some hugely talented people in the project, with Patsy, Zohra, Chris and Eamonn making huge strides to further our research in component based architecture, domain specific languages and in-network management, and all of this work is reflected in the delieverables of 4WARD, which are the main visable output from a project.
WP2
D-2.1 Technical Requirements
D-2.2 Draft Architectural Framework
D-2.3.0 Mechanisms for Generic PathsArchitectural Framework: new release and first evaluation results
D-2.3.1 Final Architectural Framework

WP4
D-4.1 Definition of Scenarios and Use Cases
D-4.2 In-Network Management Concept
D-4.3 In-network management design
Papers are also a clear output form the project and I collaborated on 6 specific 4WARD papers:
1. In the paper “Towards a New Architectural Framework; The Nth Stratum Concept“, we presented our new architectural framework called the Nth Stratum concept, which takes a holistic approach to tackle these new needs and requirements on a future communication system.
2. In the paper “A Framework for In-Network Management in Heterogeneous Future Communication Networks“, we proposed the radically new paradigm of in-network management, which targets the embedding of self-management capabilities deep inside the network nodes. In this paper, we focus on our framework for in-network management, which allows management logic to be embedded and executed within network nodes. Based on a specific use-case of bio-inspired network management, we demonstrate how our framework can be exploited in a network failure scenario using quorum sensing and chemotaxis.
3. In the paper “Mobility Scenarios for the Future Internet: The 4WARD Approach”, we highlight the 4WARD research approach to make a vision of a “network of information” reality. New system design methods for customized architectures on flexible network platforms will be combined with the capabilities of virtualization of all network resources including the wireless access. Together with a new generic path concept for flexible interconnection of objects of any type and a new paradigm for naming, addressing and managing mobile objects, the envisaged “network of information” model will be constructed.
4. In the paper “Architectural Principles and Elements of In-Network Management” we propose the in-network management (INM) paradigm, which adopts a clean slate design approach to the management of future communication networks that is brought about by evolutionary design principles. The proposed paradigm builds on embedded management capabilities to address the intrinsic nature, and hence, close relationship between the network and its management. At the same time, INM assists in the gradual adoption of embedded self-managing processes to progressively achieve adequate and practical degrees of INM. We demonstrate how INM can be exploited in current and future network management by its application to P2P networks.
5. In the paper “An Introduction to Network Stack Design using Software Design Patterns” we present our architectural framework which proposes a component-based architecture consisting of building blocks of reusable functionality, components that allow the construction of these building blocks and the composition of complex functionality, control elements facilitating communication between blocks, and a repository of building blocks. The architecture allows for rapid composition of federations of components, enabling an easy transition from present network infrastructure towards the future Internet and realizing the on-demand creation and configuration of protocol stacks for components.
6. In the paper “A Case Study for defining Interoperable Network Components using MDD”, we present a case study using Model Driven Development addressing interoperability requirements in next generation networks. Our approach focuses on the specification of a high level Contract Domain Specific Language we combine Component-based Software Engineering for the design with our long-term experience of network resource management and performance optimisation. Part of our case study is a tool chain that supports the network engineers who deploy next generation networks.
None of these papers would have seen the light of day without the kind support and drive of my co-authors who included Patsy, Zohra, Sven, Chris, Eamonn, Sasi, Dmitri, D. Dudkowski, M. Brunner, G. Nunzi, C. Mingardi, C. Meirosu, S. Engberg, M. Söllner, C. Görg, K. Pentikousis, J. Mª Cabero Lopez, P. Bertin, M. Johnsson, J. Huusko, T. Frantti, F-U Andersen and T-M-T. Nguyen. I have gained many friends going through this process.
Finally the one surprise output from the project has been the open source release on the CBA concept, which has been the seed for OpenTinos. All in all I see the support of OpenTinos keeping me quite busy in the coming months.