Information services and technologies

Internet Research

ISSN: 1066-2243

Article publication date: 23 October 2007

579

Citation

Schmidt, T.C. (2007), "Information services and technologies", Internet Research, Vol. 17 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/intr.2007.17217eaa.001

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2007, Emerald Group Publishing Limited


Information services and technologies

This special issue presents latest advancements in internet services and technologies as presented at the TERENA Networking Conference in May 2007. The annual Networking Conference of the Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association offers a unique European platform for research network operators to meet with network researchers and research users in an open discourse. The conference brings together leading figures from research, management, industry and governance to present and discuss the technical and strategic aspects of the provision of networks and services to the research and education community. TNCs have well-established as the events focusing on new directions, trends and technologies, with innovations being close to an early real-world deployment.

“Visible services, transparent networks” – trends from the conference

“Transparent networks for carrying services to users” was the mainstream at this year’s TERENA Networking Conference, TNC 2007, reflecting well the ambiguity of the current state of research infrastructure. Mature and capacious conditions of today’s networks at the one hand enable an ubiquitous and reliable access to services, on the other hand an increasing occurrence of barriers and restrictions suppresses the transparency needed for the evolvement of new, unforeseen services and communication objectives.

The event was officially opened by Inge Mærkedahl, who is Director General of the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation. She emphasised the human touch that’s needed to achieve “fundamental steps”, which “originate from the ability to think innovatively”. She said, “Innovation often arises when you are working at the limits.”

The opening keynote speaker works at the limits in her chosen field of biological oceanography. Professor Katherine Richardson of the University of Copenhagen also proved to be a very satisfied user of network services. She described how cutting edge research was made possible during an eight-month voyage.

Vast amounts of data from 71 projects were collected, transmitted and analysed, facilitated by Forskningsnettet, the network run by the Danish National Research and Education Network (NREN) UNIC. With this information Katherine Richardson and her colleagues are piecing together how global interactions between the atmosphere, oceans and marine organisms could relate to climate change. Without the data and network systems we have today, such complex research projects simply wouldn’t be possible, she said. “You people give us the chance to do this,” she thanked the plenary audience.

In a follow up session on networks for e-science, Martin Bech of UNIC talked of “taking the NREN around the world”, providing the voyagers with satellite-linked services with support 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week. And he described how school children in Denmark had also been able to follow the expedition “live” on a daily basis, with a national content portal provided for schools.

Popular plenaries. Other plenary speakers included Jun Murai, of Keio University in Japan, who is leader of the famous Widely Integrated Distributed Environment (WIDE) project. He highlighted the spectacular development of Internet use in Japan and also discussed pan-Asian developments. Although recent land-speed records demonstrate the enormous progress being made in connectivity around the world, latency is a real problem. This can only be ameliorated if the loop of international networks is completed, he argued. A map of internet topography viewed from above the North Pole should show a complete circle, and Japan should not remain the “Far West”.

Kevin C. Almeroth from the University of California at Santa Barbara assessed the status of Multicast in his plenary presentation. While the popular perception is that multicast deployment failed in general, he pointed out that it is being used effectively in enterprise and company networks, campus networks and in the military. After multicast protocol design in the first decade had mainly tackled intra-domain solutions, current developments, e.g. of hybrid approaches will make it a very relevant application for NRENs and their customers.

Mobile computing was the focus of keynote speaker Otthein Herzog of the University of Bremen in Germany. He identified it as a key technology for the twenty-first century and shared his experiences of researching and demonstrating advanced services, with wearable computing pilot projects currently under way to assist fire fighters, medical staff and engineers.

Alert to security. In her keynote talk, Claudia Natanson of the multinational drinks company Diageo discussed how security should be a visible benefit and not just an overhead. Awareness of security issues was relatively high at TNC 2007, reflecting a general trend in the world at large, with the subject cropping up in a wide variety of discussions.

In a session on Protecting Users, Christoph Graf of the Swiss NREN SWITCH said, “we are making progress” in the co-operative approach to securing the GÉANT2 network. Colleen Shannon of the USA’s Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) spoke in sessions on monitoring and on protecting infrastructure. She described how CAIDA has witnessed a change in emphasis from the vandalism of “script kiddies” to more professionally orchestrated organised crime and that current anti-virus approaches are merely a helpless trial.

A panel session on campus issues also rapidly shifted focus from performance to security, with two themes emerging: availability of services, and management rather than prevention of risk. The question of making services available and friendly to guest users was also a concern, tied up with whether possible attacks are more likely to come from within or without the campus circle of users. Another challenge is the need for appropriate policies in order to have a well-functioning network, an issue that also arose in other talks, on eduroam for example.

In a packed final plenary session Max Ibel of Google Switzerland explained the company’s file system, highlighting a topic of growing interest to NRENs – storage. Make it simple so you can keep it simple, was his core message.

Each day’s plenary lectures set the scene for the ensuing sessions. Of the 106 presentations given during 32 sessions, talks on security, identity management, campus networks, optical networking and mobility and roaming drew the largest crowds. More than 470 networkers attended TNC 2007, which was hosted by UNIC and held on campus at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) in Lyngby, north of Copenhagen. Participant evaluations of the conference showed that TNC 2007 was considered to be among the best three, alongside previous events held in Pozna (2005) and Catania (2006). Preliminary feedback suggested the best speakers were Katherine Richardson, Martin Bech, Ken Klingenstein of Internet 2, Klaus Grobe of ADVA Optical Networking, and Josh Howlett of the British NREN, UKERNA.

Archives of live-streamed speeches, speakers’ slides and other TNC 2007 information are all available at: http://tnc2007.terena.org/

Papers selected. The TNC 2007 conference program had been prepared on the basis of an outstandingly high number of 133 submissions, out of which 80 or 60 per cent have been selected for presentation. Along with 26 plenary or otherwise invited talks, the total program of 106 contributions was considered to select the best eight papers on internet perspectives for publication in this special issue. Another six outstanding articles on campus information technologies were chosen for presentation in a special issue of Campus-Wide Information Systems.

The first paper by McCarthy, Edwards and Dunmore presents “Network transparency in a mountain rescue domain”, a safety critical application of mobile ad hoc networks. Based on Internet network mobility the authors display a joined solution with a Mountain Rescue Team to the problem of non-intrusively keeping rescue workers connected on their dangerous duties. An all-IPv6 approach with optimized MANEMO routing along with an appropriate mountain rescue network user interface is demonstrated to serve as a promising approach.

Skarmeta et al. continue to address mobility in the second paper. They report on the extension of eduroam authentication and authorisation mechanisms, allowing for the exchange of personal security credentials and attributes for a fine granular service access. The project objective lies in the enhanced availability of the multiservice architecture for the European transnational and -institutional wireless access infrastructure.

The third paper “The future of mobile computing” by plenary speaker Otthein Herzog et al. from the Centre for Computing Technologies and Mobile Research presents a wide overview of the manifold activities at the German state of Bremen, donating special focus on mobile business and work process integration, as well as shorthand links from innovation to product dissemination.

“Is global IPv6 deployment on track?” is the question investigated by Domingues, Friaças and Veiga. The authors analyse address allocations and backbone routing tables to inquire on the current state and the rate of spread of the next generation Internet protocol. Employing first-hand knowledge and data, common prejudices are attacked and remarkable facts observed.

Multicast deployment questions as raised by plenary speaker Almeroth are taken up in the fifth contribution “Between underlay and overlay: on deployable, efficient, mobility-agnostic group communication services”. The paper analysis key issues of current inter-domain multicast routing and leads the path to hybrid architectures, which not only can span the Internet core in overlays, but are also capable to seamlessly support mobility services for group communication.

The perspective is altered to lower layers in the following two articles. “Articulated private networks in UCLP” by Grasa et al. presents user controlled light paths, a virtualisation framework for optical switching. With the help of UCLP software network operators and end users are enabled to configure their dedicated network resources in an end-to-end fashion, thereby gaining access to point-to-point fibre transmission across domains.

A large-scale deployment project of photonic networks on the Dutch SURFnet6, StarPlane, is subsequently described by Grosso et al. “StarPlane – a national dynamic photonic network controlled by GRID applications” introduces a research project for light path control, which allows for fast reconfiguration and topology changes at runtime.

An illustrative application of the Internet capabilities concludes this selection. Martín et al. outline in “Sharing audiovisual content using a P2P environment based on JXTA” aims, concepts and realisation of a distributed audiovisual service based on peer-to-peer technologies. The special focus of their project work lies on scalable streaming of high-quality media.

The TNC 2007 was a great success. It is our hope that the selected papers in this special issue will reflect the high quality of presentations and contribute to the advancements of both, network research and research networks with equal value.

Thomas C. SchmidtHAW Hamburg, GermanyEmail: t.schmidt@ieee.org

Related articles