Editorial
This special issue presents latest advancements in networked campus information 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 is 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 would not 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 via 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 six papers on campus issues for publication in this special issue. Another eight outstanding articles on general internet technologies were chosen for presentation in a special issue of Internet Research.
The first paper by Kutscher, Ott and Bartsch presents “Supporting network access and service location in dynamic environments”. The authors show in conceptual work and practical implementation that service discovery and service selection can be achieved offline with the help of internet media guides as a standardised information access mechanism. Users are thus enabled to detect and select wireless network access services while they are unconnected.
Tveter, Melve and Linden, in the second paper, discuss the development of transnational federations in higher education, donating special focus to Kalmar Union, a current initiative for interconnecting the Nordic federations. “Towards interconnecting the nordic identity federations” compares policies of existing academic identity federations and legislative aspects under the perspective of trust management between established national identity federations.
The third paper “Setting up a Grid-CERT: experiences of an academic CSIRT” by Klaus Möller from the German DFN-CERT team considers security problems arising from distributed Grid infrastructures. In contrast to common public services like the worldwide web, grids offer access to dynamic resources such as computer storage and computing resources under the umbrella of a virtual organisation.
A tiny looking, but unpleasant routing conflict problem arising from multiple NAT deployment is solved in “Utilising IPv6 over VPN to enhance home service connectivity”, the fourth paper prepared by Huhtanen, Silverajan and Harju. While colliding private IPv4 address ranges in use at home and access networks will prevent users to access there home network, a 6to4 extension of IPv4 home connectivity employing the IPv6 address space will transparently resolve the issue bare of provider assistance. While away, users following this simple configuration scheme will thus be enabled to access their home services no matter what network address is chosen at the visited access network.
Jordi Trapero et al. present a platform for multilateral IP telephony peering in the fifth contribution “i2CAT experiences in advanced SIP-based communications”. A SIP-based telephony exchange point approach is presented, its interoperability with H.323 demonstrated and experiences from a regional testbed are discussed. Finally, the last paper of Péter Szegedi examines next generation IP networks from an economical perspective: an a priori CAPEX model for ASON/GMPLS networking infrastructure is presented to allow for statistical cost calculations based on actual network and traffic characteristics.
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, Germany
