TSSG at EU Future Internet Assembly (FIA, Prague, 10th-13th May 2009)

The TSSG had a strong delegation at the Future Internet Assembly (FIA) conference in Prague 10th-13th May 2009.

Willie Donnelly, Director of the TSSG, was the Irish national delegate at the meeting on national Future Internet initiatives. These reflect the EU-level activities in local activities in each member state.

Kevin Quinn represented the TSSG in the activities relating to Future Internet infrastructure, management and testbeds. This maps to the activity in the TSSG in our Communications Infrastructure Management (CIM) competence centre led by Miguel ponce de Leon. The key EU FP7 projects with TSSG involvement in this area are: 4WARD, EFIPSANS, AutoI, and PanLabs II (PII). Steven Davy, Kevin Quinn and Martín Serrano attended a session on "Management and Service-Aware Networking Architectures for Future Internet" or MANA for short. This session was opened by Rainer Zimmermann, the Head of Unit, Future Networks in FP7. The big topics of the day were scalability of future internet architectures with respect to addressing and routing, and specifically in relation to the realisation of virtual networks. These were raised in the panel sessions concerning Future Internet Architectures and the MANA panel session. Also raised were issues related to stability of multiple competing autonomic control loops, or "who controls the control loops?".

Patrick Hayden represented the TSSG in the activities relating to Future Internet services. This maps to the activity in the TSSG in our Pervasive Communications Services (PCS) competence centre led by Kevin Doolin. The key EU FP7 projects with TSSG involvement in this area are: PERSIST and VITAL++. Patrick presented PERSIST at the Future Internet Service Offer session and participated in panel 1 whose topic was "Challenges for the Future Internet". The panel discussed the challenges and functionalities of the future internet as provided by the Future Internet Taskforce. PERSIST addresses 69 of the 177 functionalities (39%) identified by the Future Internet Taskforce. In his presentation, Patrick outlined which functionalities are addressed by PERSIST and identified a number of the resulting research challenges.

Jim Clarke and Brian Foley are nominated “caretakers” for the Future Internet Assembly Trust and Identity Group. Their role for FIA Prague was organisation and running of three dedicated Trust and Identity Breakout sessions on: (1) Identity Provisioning, (2) Trust Platforms, Models and Tools and (3) Experimental and Empirical Approaches for Trust, Privacy and Identity in the Future Internet. This maps to the activity in the TSSG in our Security Special Interest Group (SIG), that is currently a important sub-set of the CIM competence centre activity. The key EU FP7 projects with TSSG involvement in this area are: Inco-Trust, Think-Trust, CoMiFin, and Parsifal.

The TSSG presented at a permanent stand at the event highlighting interim results of selected current projects. The TSSG has 11 FP7 projects directly linked to the EU Future Internet Assembly, and a number of other active projects with some relevance. A technical presentation of a policy-based mutlihoming solution was presented. This multihoming solution uses the recently IETF-approved protocol “SHIM6”, which is part of the IPv6 suite of protocols. The TSSG presentation is one of the few worldwide implementations of SHIM6. On top of this the TSSG have developed a policy engine where the user can specify preferred end-to-end paths, which affects the operation of the SHIM6 protocols to meet the preference where possible. This work was carried out as part of the TSSG’s involvement in the EFIPSANS project.

As the role of the Future Internet Assembly is to bring together researchers across interrelated domains, the TSSG members attended and contributed to a number of other relevant sessions. The full set of slides will be available shortly on the Future Internet Forum Web portal.