Only two days before the co-organised SAIL and EFRAIM event on Future Media Distribution using Information Centric Networks where I will have the pleasure to be your host. The registration is now closed as more than 100 people from multiple organisations have registered to the event.

We have worked hard to prepare an interesting day packed with presentations, tutorial, workshops and demonstrations.  The morning session will include a keynote from the major Swedish content broadcaster TV4. This will be followed by presentations on the business aspects of content distribution as well as a tutorial on ICN and NetInf in particular.  The morning session will conclude with a panel discussion on the maturity of the ICN solutions.

Ericsson Studio will host the prototype demonstrations in the afternoon

In the afternoon, after an initial talk on the Networked Society, you will be free to visit the different demonstration booths in the fantastic Ericsson Studio or to participate in one of the four parallel workshops. Of course, the prototypes that we have put in place for this event are all in some way related to information centric networking, but all work-packages in SAIL have contributed their share to highlights what is our vision of the future internet: Content, Connectivity and Cloud.

Please see the event web site for more details on the venue and an up-to-date programme.

P.S. If you can’t manage to be in Stockholm and attend this event, please stay tune as we plan to post the presentation material on this web site.

Disclosure and disclaimer: I am engaged in SAIL, an ICT project around the Future Internet, on behalf of Ericsson. However the opinions expressed in this post are my personal, and not those of the SAIL project or my employer.

The first IEEE International Conference on Cloud Networking (IEEE CloudNet) took place last week (28-30 November 2012) in the beautiful city of Paris. Naturally SAIL, being in one of the fronts of research in the area, was repsesented. Daniel Turull (KTH), Shubhabrata Roy (INRIA) and I (João, PTIN) were there. Daniel was there to present libnetvirt, Shubhabrata Roy to present an Elastic Video distribution demo and I to present the Link Negotiation Protocol (LNP).

Being the conference’s first edition I believe it was a very good one. We had excellent keynote speakers, such as:

• Radia Perlman (Intel Labs), who had a talk more related to network protocols like spanning tree, TRILL (who would guess these two ), Ethernet and so on;
• Tarik Taleb (NEC Europe), who presented extremely well the FP7 Mobile Cloud Networking project (which has just started) and in-between referred SAIL as one project working in Cloud Networking;
• David Bernstein (IEEE Cloud Standards, EC FP7 eInfrastructure, US NIST, Cloudscaling) also had a very interesting talk, especially in the end of his intervention (I will come back to this ahead in this post).

There were a lot of interesting presentations. You can check the conference website, download some of the presentations, and latter see the articles in the IEEE explorer. With respect to the LNP presentation it went quite well (but of course I am suspicious ) and the timing was, in my opinion, perfect. The presentation slot was in the last day of the conference, first paper presentation of the day, right after the opening speech from David Bernstein. David talked about the IEEE P2302 Intercloud Standard and Testbed project, but the best was left for last, when he talked about the need to establish enterprise VPNs with Clouds across multiple domains in a cloud fashion way. For those familiar with the subject this was a perfect incentive to present the LNP. Although the core of the paper was the LNP, the content was always supported by CloNe’s architecture.

During the presentation I stated that there were currently no suitable “cloud alike” interfaces available for the network, but said that these were starting to appear, making reference to the Open Cloud Networking Interface (OCNI) and libnetvirt. In the second session of that morning Daniel Turull presented the libnetvirt. Later in the afternoon was time for the demos, including the one from INRIA.

I had a small discussion with Professor Harry Perros from the North Carolina State University concerning the presented architecture and how it would work from a business perspective and later with Orange fellows regarding the establishment of VPNs across multiple domains and connecting them to Clouds.

In the end, the only sad new I bring from Paris is that we did not win the Best Paper Award with the LNP paper to which we were nominated along with other 4 papers (I hope I can live with this ). Nevertheless this is an external recognition of the good work that is being carried on within SAIL.

With the finish line ahead, let’s keep on SAILing strong…

Disclosure and disclaimer: I am engaged in SAIL, an ICT project about the Future Internet, on behalf of PTIN. However the opinions expressed in this post are my personal, and not those of the SAIL project or my employer.

Three weeks ago the SAIL project met physically again. This time in Bristol, at the premises of the SAIL partner HP Labs. The main meeting took place between Tuesday Sep. 18th and Thursday Sep. 20th, but already on Monday several of the work packages met, eager to get going. And some also stayed during Friday that week, continuing the work.

In a pan-European project like SAIL, with 25 different partner organizations involved, these face-to-face meetings with interactions between everyone involved, are a good and needed complement to the more daily work. Some areas needs interaction beyond phone conferences and emails.

The PMT and POETs in session

On Monday evening the PMT (project management team) and the POET (project overall engineering team) met to outline the activities during the remainder of the SAIL project time.

The working days at these meetings are quite long and intense, and during the evenings the discussions continues over dinner. Tuesday evening included a dinner for everyone, and this time we visited S/S Great Britain, a great experience and very impressive. Suitable enough, as we are approaching the end of the SAIL era, this ship was the “bridge between sail and steam, the bridge between wooden and iron ships”. A remarkable piece of engineering, which has been restored. A visit is recommended if you are in Bristol.

"All hands on deck"

The journey for SAIL continues, and we are starting to see the end. The end of the SAIL project, but not the end related to the technologies developed within SAIL.

Our overall project coordinator, Thomas, discussing the course for the rest of the journey

Disclosure and disclaimer: I am engaged in SAIL, an ICT project about the Future Internet, on behalf of Ericsson. However the opinions expressed in this post are my personal, and not those of the SAIL project or my employer.

A workshop on Information-centric Networking, ICN2012, was held at SIGCOMM 2012 which took place in Helsinki, Finland August 13-17, 2012. With over 80 participants it was the second most popular workshop at the conference, beaten only by the workshop on Software Defined Networking (SDN), which is currently the most hyped area in networking research.

At the workshop 16 high quality papers were presented (the acceptance rate was below 25%). The papers addressed a wide range of ICN research issues including architecture, routing, resource management, forwarding, caching and mobility. There were also papers addressing how ICN technology can be applied in a data center context as well as how to provide access control in an ICN environment.

Two papers got the best paper award and will be re-published in a special issue of Computer Communications Review (CCR). The first paper was a paper Joint Hop-by-hop and Receiver-Driven Interest Control Protocol for Content-Centric Networks, by Carofiglio, et. al. which points to the importance of shaping interest requests in ICN networks. The second awarded paper was Access Control Enforcement Delegation for Information-Centric Networking Architectures, Fotiou, et. al. which proposes a novel approach to do access control in ICN.

All papers of the ICN2012 workshop are available at: http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2012/icn.php
For more information on ICN in general, please refer to:
IRTF ICNRG web page: http://irtf.org/icnrg

Disclosure and disclaimer: I am engaged in SAIL, an ICT project about the Future Internet, on behalf of Ericsson. However the opinions expressed in this post are my personal, and not those of the SAIL project or my employer.

The Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) has recently formed a research group on Information-centric Networking (ICNRG).

The group had its first official meeting at the IETF meeting which was held in Vancouver, Canada, July 29-August 3, 2012. The meeting was well attended with around 100 participants.

The ICNRG group is chaired by Börje Ohlman (Ericsson), Dave Oran (Cisco) and Dirk Kutscher (NEC). Both Börje and Dirk are part of the SAIL project NetInf workpackage.

At the meeting Stephen Farrell from SAIL presented the proposed ICN naming scheme ‘ni’, which standardize how to use hashes to name information objects. For details please see http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-farrell-decade-ni.

Other topics presented at the meeting was ‘Name Resolution & Routing‘, ‘Resource Management‘ and ‘Deployments and Applications‘. Presenters represented major vendors, ISPs as well as academia.

For more information please refer to:

• Agenda and meeting material: http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/84/agenda/agenda-84-icnrg
• Minutes of meeting: http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/84/minutes/minutes-84-icnrg
• ICNRG web page: http://irtf.org/icnrg

Disclosure and disclaimer: I am engaged in SAIL, an ICT project about the Future Internet, on behalf of Ericsson. However the opinions expressed in this post are my personal, and not those of the SAIL project or my employer.

Are we heading towards a situation where Internet top-level domains will replace nations as jurisdiction? Will it in the future be more relevant to ask yourself whether you trust Google, Telia or Amazon as legal companies rather than Sweden, Germany or Syria as a nations?

Questions like these might be subject for discussion at the upcoming 2012 European Dialogue on Internet Governance (EuroDIG) in Stockholm 14-15 June, where the overall tagline for the conference is ‘Who sets the rules for the Internet?’.

We believe it is important to assure that legislations and regulations follows hand in hand with future internet technologies being developed in EU-funded projects like SAIL. It is important that the legislation address the way these technologies will be used.

Network of Information (NetInf) is a set of mechanisms from SAIL where named “information objects”, eg the latest episode of your favorite TV-show, are the central concept as opposed to a physical computer, or “node” as in today’s Internet.
Assume that NetInf (or similar technologies) gain attraction and start to replace the current internet backbone, does Internet regulation then have to change? That is one of the questions that we will bring to the table in the EuroDIG plenary dedicated to “Business innovation, future technologies and services: Opportunities and challenges for businesses, users and regulators”.

While NetInf is a future technology whose success is yet to be proved, storage of data in the cloud is already an everyday occurrence, not only by private persons (e.g. Gmail, Flickr, Facebook), but also by enterprises and municipalities. It is evident that current regulation often is blunt and not always well adopted for the cloud use-case. A couple of examples:

• If a Swedish municipality would like to use cloud services like Google Apps for storing e.g. records of their salary payments, they have to be 100% sure that the supplier of the cloud service, or any of its subcontractors, are handling the information in accordance with the Personal Data Act (“personuppgiftslagen”, PUL), else they are breaking the law (in Swedish, view the Google Translate version here). In this case the users regulation impose a barrier for the use of cloud services.
• There are also cases where it is the receiver’s regulation that imposes the barrier. The recent so called “manga case” drew a lot of attention. It could be seen as an example where what is legal in country A, in fact is illegal according to the legislation in country B. In such a case, how could you as user of a cloud service appearing as serving under country A, be sure that the cloud service provider do not use e.g. distributed cloud resources from country B for storing your content?

When cloud computing was at its infancy, and the cloud was limited to one big data center at one clear location, the above issues where perhaps not that tricky.

However, already today cloud providers want to optimize the quality of their services by deploying data centers as close to the actual users as possible, across a multitude of national borders, still though within the one and same internet domain for you as a user.

For you as a user of the service, it should be more relevant to ask ‘who is storing my data?’ rather than ‘in what country the data is being stored’. National borders tends, in my view, to get less and less relevant, while the importance of under what internet domain your service provider is running their business increases. Time for a fundamental change of perspective perhaps? Should national laws and regulations change to regulations based on domains and top domains on Internet instead? And in such a case, what would be the impact when commercial enterprises start to buy the new gTLDs (top level domains)?

In EU funded research projects we are developing techniques that will make above scenarios possible, and we are aware of possible regulatory impacts they might have. But we are not legislators. We therefore urge the discussion to take place in foras like EuroDIG – and we are happy to take part!

Disclosure and disclaimer: I am engaged in SAIL, an ICT project about the Future Internet, on behalf of Ericsson. However the opinions expressed in this post are my personal, and not those of the SAIL project or my employer.

I hope you have noticed the information about the upcoming SAIL Summer School by now?In June this year SAIL and the University of Cantabria will host a summer school. “Future of Internet explained – today!” is the catchphrase we use, and I do believe you won’t be disappointed. We have a full agenda for the four days, with a great mix of speakers. As SAIL has worked with concepts around a future Internet architecture during two years, there’s a lot of findings from SAIL you will get to know but there will also be speakers from outside of SAIL.

And in the end it is up to you as participants as well – we will have a Work-in-Progress session, “powered by you”, and in between and during the sessions we are sure that there will be a lot of discussions and knowledge exchange between everyone.

We are also looking forward to some more “social” events during the week, both organized and more ad-hoc meetings.

So, what are you waiting for? Be sure to register already today. The registration is open until end of May, but there is after all a limited number of seats at the SAIL Summer School. So in order to secure your participation, don’t wait!

Disclosure and disclaimer: I am engaged in SAIL, an ICT project about the Future Internet, on behalf of Ericsson. However the opinions expressed in this post are my personal, and not those of the SAIL project or my employer.

The January SAIL general meeting was held here in Lisbon, at the premises of  IST. It was great to host the colleagues from the SAIL project, some of which have been here already for a couple of times, due to other common projects in which we were involved.

The meeting went well, especially the 12 technology demos from the various work packages. These demos show that the project is on the right track and really is achieving something. Some reporting coming from the technical results of this meeting, and the demos, can be found in the latest SAIL newsletter, issued just after the meeting. I hope you enjoy reading it.

The social event diner was held on a boat. Not a sailing one, just because there is none in Lisbon with enough capacity to accommodate the whole SAIL team. Still, we had the opportunity to dine along the shore of the Tagus river in Lisbon, enjoying Lisbon’s skyline by night.

Let’s wait for another opportunity to host the colleagues at our university.

Disclosure and disclaimer: I am engaged in SAIL, an ICT project about the Future Internet, on behalf of IST-TUL. However the opinions expressed in this post are my personal, and not those of the SAIL project or my employer.

Once again the whole SAIL-project is gathered. This time in Lisbon, at Instituto Superior Técnico. The 4th General Meeting takes place this week, and one of the highlights of the week is the internal demo event.

The time had come when prototypes that are been worked on across the project were showcased to everyone within SAIL. No less than twelve demo stations, four from each technical work package, were set up.

It was great to see many of the concepts, that previously have been explained in presentations and the deliverables, in real life. It made it easier to grasp some aspects, and to see the concepts turned into code is a nice start of the last year of the project.

All demos worked. As expected perhaps, but as we all know – anything can happen during a demo.

Tuesday, which was the man demo day, had one plenary session where all demo teams gave a quick overview of what we were about to see. The session was introduced by Michael Soellner, theme leader for the prototyping theme.

Next it was time for the demos. Everyone within the SAIL project walked around and explored the twelve demos stations. The opportunity to discuss details and ways to further evolve the concepts was well used.

Further more, we took the opportunity to capture all demos on video. We will now take some time and look through all the raw footage, and to edit the material into separate movies. Keep your eyes on this blog and on the main SAIL web site, there’s a good chance that you will be able to have a look yourself later on.

Disclosure and disclaimer: I am engaged in SAIL, an ICT project about the Future Internet, on behalf of Ericsson. However the opinions expressed in this post are my personal, and not those of the SAIL project or my employer.

The European Commission continuously reviews the progress of all EC-funded research projects. As SAIL is one of these projects we are of course also reviewed regularly.

Tomorrow is the day for the formal review of the first twelve months of the SAIL project. The final preparations by us who will make the presentations are almost done, after having spent a full day together. The only thing left is to print the handouts.

The final updates of the slides in progress

This is not the first review of SAIL, we where reviewed in March as well. This time we will partly meet the same persons as last time, and also a few new faces.

From SAIL we are a group of seven people; the overall project manager, the technical manager, the four WP-leaders and the security theme leader.

Now it’s almost time to wrap up the preparations. Keep an eye here for a summary of the outcome, and we might even tweet from the review tomorrow – so follow @SAILproject on Twitter for the latest news.

Disclosure and disclaimer: I am engaged in SAIL, an ICT project about the Future Internet, on behalf of Ericsson. However the opinions expressed in this post are my personal, and not those of the SAIL project or my employer.