Subject: [gaia] Time for exploring new Internet architectures?

From: Arjuna Sathiaseelan <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 5 Jan 2014 11:29:25 +0000

Dear All,
  Happy New Year!

During the holidays, it was a privilege to get a few more members
including the commonwealth telecommunications organisations.

Just to kickstart an initial discussion:

There has been significant focus on new edge access technologies with
all the promising white space initiatives especially with Microsoft
and Google showing a keen interest in these technologies:

http://google-africa.blogspot.de/2013/11/trial-in-cape-town-shows-that-tv-white.html
http://www.microsoft.com/africa/4afrika/white_spaces_project.aspx

And folks from Berkeley on GSM whitespaces:
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2013/EECS-2013-198.pdf

Its great to know that there is much wider acceptance and expectations
on newer access tech to deliver its promises because of all the known
challenges faced by existing access tech.

So this naturally raises an important question: There has been
significant amount of work done on new Internet architectures for e.g
Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) and Information Centric Networking
(ICN).There has been some proven evidence how such technologies could
reduce cost of Internet access especially on how DTN could be used for
time-shifting content during off-peak hours reducing costs
significantly..

“Delay Tolerant Bulk Data Transfers on the Internet“, N. Laoutaris, G.
Smaragdakis, P. Rodriguez, R. Sundaram, in ACM/SIGMETRICS’09.

With all the issues with power and power accounting for 50% of OPEX
for rural networks
(http://www.itu-apt.org/gtas11/green-solutions.pdf), should'nt we
start trialling out new Internet architectures that move away from the
traditional "always-on" model to "almost always off" mode which calls
for the need to bring in tech like DTN and ICN. It is absolutely
encouraging to see that there seems to be an infrastructural thinking
in this direction:
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/nsdi13/nsdi13-final182.pdf

Infact ICN has other proven benefits:

(i)  the publish/subscribe approach reduces bandwidth wastage ( why do
we need to PUSH all the heavy long tailed videos to the cloud - just
publish metadata and based on interest, push the data on demand? This
applies for all the other OSN content sharing..)

(ii) And the other inherent edge caching benefits for localised access
(infact the Google cache initiatives in Africa is encouraging:
http://www.tnj.com/career/people-move/googles-ory-okolloh-working-access-and-transparency-sub-saharan-africa)

So my question to all: Is this the right moment to start deploying and
trialling out these new Internet architectures? Yay or Nay?

 If Yay: Are there any planned initiatives? If so, what would be the challenges?

If Nay:  Would just getting an access infrastructure (and all the
other logistics that come with it) to a community would be sufficient?

Regards
Arjuna

-- 
Arjuna Sathiaseelan | http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~as2330/

---

From: "Prof. Adam Wolisz" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 05 Jan 2014 13:30:02 +0100

Arjuna,

Happy New Year!!

===

Here come my 2 cents:

1.  I completely agree that we need a new "Operation style" -in
fact not only for the developing regions!

I do believe that we need this new "operation style" also to
mitigate the costs of the networking

infrastructure  everywhere - I have discussed some of this in

Wolisz,
A. "Desirable Trends
in Mobile
Communication",

ACM Mobile Computing
and Communication Review (MC2R),
vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 2–9, January, 2012

2/   I am not sure yet if a new
ARCHITECTURE is really THE KEY issue.  It seems that many of the

issues addressed in your statement can be attacked - in
clever way - within the limits of existing

architectures - or with their "slight extensions"

Some candidate area:

a/ re- designing of the applications!

In fact, numerous of today´s applications are
unnecessarily depending on

the connectivity when  local operation (with locally
pre- stored data!) would be entirely sufficient.

==>  IN FACT your statement goes in this
direction  :-)

b/   The efficiency of today´s  applications is really
poor.

Some - very simplistic! - ways to improve it have
been recently discussed in

F.Quiang et
al. How to Reduce Smartphone Traffic Volume by 30%?
In Springer

LNCS 7799 pp.42-52 (proc. of the
PAM 2013)

c/ more efficient discovery of and access to  locally,
peer-hosted information  is needed.

We know that frequently numerous people in the
proximity are interested in the same

information,  and might just share it, instead of
Separately downloading it from the infrastructure.

See, e.g.

X.Bao et
al. “DataSpotting: Exploiting Naturally Clustered Mobile
Devices to Offload Cellular Traffic”

Infocom 2013;

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6566807&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D6566807

So  my take would be: Let us explore - by research and
experimentation - where  the "limits in the

architecture" really are - and what can be done
within the existing architectural limits?

In other words:  -the answer  - as for today - seems to me
to be:  YeyN   ..

best

adam

Slide 24

On 05.01.2014 12:29, Arjuna Sathiaseelan wrote:

Dear All,
Happy New Year!

Regards
Arjuna

---

From: "Trossen, Dirk" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 5 Jan 2014 10:15:42 -0500

Arjuna & Adam,

I'm a little bit cautious to jump into a technologically-driven
discussion. I feel that it is more important to ask what it is that we
believe where the "current way the Internet works" (some might interpret
that as 'the current Internet architecture') falls short in providing
universal access in an economically feasible way. Otherwise, we might
look like a group of people who are looking for solutions that would fit
their technologies. 

If we indeed turn to shortfalls, I think that a good starting point
might lie in the question of what the constraints are. These constraints
can be 'architectural limits' (as Adam expressed it) or simply
'operational limits' (driven by either policy or/and economic
interests). 

For instance, if we look at service-level latency as a constraint, we
could argue that generally there is nothing wrong with the current
architecture as it is, unless we define that latency low enough. Today's
answer to such low bound for the constraint are CDNs and clever ways of
'breaking the E2E' perception of the connection to serve content closer
to the user. End of discussion? Possibly, unless we introduce another
constraint, say efficiency. Said aforementioned 'clever' ways come at
the cost of DPI, DNS tricks, ..., all of which introduce an ICN-ish
notion to the end user but based on a location-dependent underlay.
Whether or not such approach (which is the current Internet approach) is
sustainable all depends on your constraints for latency as well as
efficiency. 

>From these core constraints, we can derive many others (such as economic
metrics such as OPEX). The question, in the context of GAIA, is which
markets are suitable for certain ranges of constraints and where do we
have 'black spots' (i.e., constraints currently not sufficiently served
by the current technologies). While the non-black spots are still
interesting to me (e.g., to improve efficiency of ICT systems in
developed markets), the black spots are interesting for us here, I
believe, in particular when hoping that new fancy developments of recent
years, such as DTN and ICN, could change the picture in terms of
removing 'black spots' over an agreed range for agreed constraints.
However, I don't think that the community at large has no systematic
understanding of these constraints, the range of them, and the black
spots in terms of markets (beyond the anecdotal work in many projects). 

Best,

Dirk
P.S.: BTW, I used to think that the question of ICN or DTN being a good
idea ought to be driven by answering the question "what can they do I
can't do in the current Internet?" After years of ICN research, I came
to believe that there's little you can do (in ICN) that you can't do in
the current Internet - if you assume that you can throw any engineering
effort into it and that efficiency does not matter. GAIA, to me, is a
group of people that knows from experience that efficiency and therefore
affordability does matter in the end, and we sometimes have to get
inventive to push the boundaries of what's currently possible - even by
re-thinking architectural foundations.

-----Original Message-----
From: gaia [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Arjuna
Sathiaseelan
Sent: 05 January 2014 11:29
To: [email-masked]
Subject: [gaia] Time for exploring new Internet architectures?

Dear All,
  Happy New Year!

There has been significant focus on new edge access technologies with
all the promising white space initiatives especially with Microsoft and
Google showing a keen interest in these technologies:

http://google-africa.blogspot.de/2013/11/trial-in-cape-town-shows-that-t
v-white.html
http://www.microsoft.com/africa/4afrika/white_spaces_project.aspx

"Delay Tolerant Bulk Data Transfers on the Internet", N. Laoutaris, G.
Smaragdakis, P. Rodriguez, R. Sundaram, in ACM/SIGMETRICS'09.

With all the issues with power and power accounting for 50% of OPEX for
rural networks (http://www.itu-apt.org/gtas11/green-solutions.pdf),
should'nt we start trialling out new Internet architectures that move
away from the traditional "always-on" model to "almost always off" mode
which calls for the need to bring in tech like DTN and ICN. It is
absolutely encouraging to see that there seems to be an infrastructural
thinking in this direction:
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/nsdi13/nsdi13-final182.pd
f

(ii) And the other inherent edge caching benefits for localised access
(infact the Google cache initiatives in Africa is encouraging:
http://www.tnj.com/career/people-move/googles-ory-okolloh-working-access
-and-transparency-sub-saharan-africa)

 If Yay: Are there any planned initiatives? If so, what would be the
challenges?

If Nay:  Would just getting an access infrastructure (and all the other
logistics that come with it) to a community would be sufficient?

Regards
Arjuna

--
Arjuna Sathiaseelan | http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~as2330/
_______________________________________________
gaia mailing list
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https://irtf.org/mailman/listinfo/gaia

Dirk Trossen 
Principal Engineer
InterDigital UK, Inc.
Shoreditch Business Center
64 Great Eastern Street
London, EC2A 3QR
T: +44 20 7749 9178
[email-masked]
www.InterDigital.com

This e-mail is intended only for the use of the individual or entity to which it is addressed, and may contain information that is privileged, confidential and/or otherwise protected from disclosure to anyone other than its intended recipient. Unintended transmission shall not constitute waiver of any privilege or confidentiality obligation. If you received this communication in error, please do not review, copy or distribute it, notify me immediately by email, and delete the original message and any attachments. Unless expressly stated in this e-mail, nothing in this message or any attachment should be construed as a digital or electronic signature.

---

From: Jon Crowcroft <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 5 Jan 2014 16:35:19 +0000

I don't want to pre-judge anything we talk about, but it would be nice to
have more folks here with stories from the coal face of challenging
deployments in the wild - what works and what doesn't and what was
surprising about why and why not - that could drive the selection of
problems to tackle, whether operational, standards, or
research/architectural...

one lesson from usability research is that if you make something more
usable for people (like me, with hearing and sight problems) you make them
even more usable for everyone else -

I suspect that if we tackle the high bar to deploy, manage and sustain an
Internet Service (relative to the disposable income in parts of the world
we're discussing), we may find something that will be equally (or even
more) of interest to the commercial outfits in the G20 etc...

this may turn out to be just nailing how to plug 'n play very very big
systems (so lessons for Internet of Things will also be useful) - so a
single engineer call out for a broadband provider in the UK is said to wipe
out the margin of profit for that customer for a year - imagine a world
where we each have a 5000 devices - so the call out rate could be 1000
times higher, or we need to scale fault free system operation UP by 1000
times - another way to put this is that in developing world, we need to
scale down costs of managing internet access by around 1000 times.

that seems like a climbable mountain....steep, but not impossible:)

happy new year

cheers
jon

On Sun, Jan 5, 2014 at 12:30 PM, Prof. Adam Wolisz <[email-masked]> wrote:

>  Arjuna,
> Happy New Year!!
> ===
> Here come my 2 cents:
>
> 1.  I completely agree that we need a new "Operation style" -in fact not
> only for the developing regions!
>      I do believe that we need this new "operation style" also to mitigate
> the costs of the networking
>       Wolisz, A. "Desirable Trends in Mobile Communication<http://www.tkn.tu-berlin.de/menue/publications1/journal_papers_and_book_chapters/?tx_sibibtex_pi1%5Bcontentelement%5D=tt_content%3A427959&tx_sibibtex_pi1%5BshowUid%5D=507813&cHash=b5bfeb6f07>",
>
> *        ACM Mobile Computing and Communication Review (MC2R)*, vol. 16,
> no. 1, pp. 2–9, January, 2012
>
> 2/   I am not sure yet if a new  ARCHITECTURE is really THE KEY issue.
> It seems that many of the
>        issues addressed in your statement can be attacked - in clever way
> - within the limits of existing
>              In fact, numerous of today´s applications are unnecessarily
> depending on
>              the connectivity when  local operation (with locally pre-
> stored data!) would be entirely sufficient.
>                ==>  IN FACT your statement goes in this direction  :-)
>
>        b/   The efficiency of today´s  applications is really poor.
>                Some - very simplistic! - ways to improve it have been
> recently discussed in
>   *                F.Quiang et al. How to Reduce Smartphone Traffic
> Volume by 30%? In *
>
>
> *Springer                  LNCS 7799 pp.42-52 (proc. of the PAM 2013)     *
>
>         c/ more efficient discovery of and access to  locally, peer-hosted
> information  is needed.
>               We know that frequently numerous people in the proximity are
> interested in the same
>              information,  and might just share it, instead of Separately
> downloading it from the infrastructure.
>              See, e.g.
>
>         X.Bao et al. “DataSpotting: Exploiting Naturally Clustered MobileDevices to Offload Cellular Traffic”
>          Infocom 2013;
>
> *So  my take would be: Let us explore - by research and experimentation - **where
> the "limits in the *
> *architecture" really are*
>
> * - and what can be done within the existing architectural limits? In
> other words:  -the answer  - as for today - seems to me to be:  YeyN   .. *
>
>
>
>
> * best adam *
>
>
> http://google-africa.blogspot.de/2013/11/trial-in-cape-town-shows-that-tv-white.htmlhttp://www.microsoft.com/africa/4afrika/white_spaces_project.aspx
>
> And folks from Berkeley on GSM whitespaces:http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2013/EECS-2013-198.pdf
>
> in this direction:https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/nsdi13/nsdi13-final182.pdf
>
> (infact the Google cache initiatives in Africa is encouraging:http://www.tnj.com/career/people-move/googles-ory-okolloh-working-access-and-transparency-sub-saharan-africa)
>
>

---

From: Arjuna Sathiaseelan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 6 Jan 2014 17:01:26 +0000

Thanks for your replies..

Ofcourse there is no single uniform solution to solve across the
entire spectrum of challenges. It is mandatory for us to understand
the entire gamut of the challenges faced in enabling universal access
and to scope out where, how and which technologies could help. This
may include reusing existing tech, re-engineering existing tech or
pushing the boundaries to rethink new architectural foundations to
solve the problems.

I am hoping GAIA will be a platform to achieve this goal. I am
optimistic that we will have more input from the other members on this
list who have significant deployment experiences.

I am wondering whether it would be a worthwhile option to have an IAB
workshop on this in a developing region?

We already have a Dagstuhl seminar planned on this topic:
http://www.dagstuhl.de/en/program/calendar/semhp/?semnr=14471

On 5 January 2014 16:35, Jon Crowcroft <[email-masked]> wrote:
> one lesson from usability research is that if you make something more usable
> for people (like me, with hearing and sight problems) you make them even
> more usable for everyone else -
>
> we're discussing), we may find something that will be equally (or even more)
> of interest to the commercial outfits in the G20 etc...
>
> where we each have a 5000 devices - so the call out rate could be 1000 times
> higher, or we need to scale fault free system operation UP by 1000 times -
> another way to put this is that in developing world, we need to scale down
> costs of managing internet access by around 1000 times.
>
>>       Wolisz, A. "Desirable Trends in Mobile Communication",
>>        ACM Mobile Computing and Communication Review (MC2R), vol. 16, no.
>> 1, pp. 2–9, January, 2012
>>
>> 2/   I am not sure yet if a new  ARCHITECTURE is really THE KEY issue.  It
>> seems that many of the
>>                 F.Quiang et al. How to Reduce Smartphone Traffic Volume by
>> 30%? In Springer
>>                  LNCS 7799 pp.42-52 (proc. of the PAM 2013)
>>
>>
>> So  my take would be: Let us explore - by research and experimentation -
>> where  the "limits in the
>> architecture" really are - and what can be done within the existing
>> architectural limits?
>> In other words:  -the answer  - as for today - seems to me to be:  YeyN
>> ..
>>
>>
>> best
>> adam
>>
>>

---

From: Edjair Mota <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Jan 2014 10:05:15 +0100

Hi all,

My name is Edjair Mota, I am a professor at the Institute of Computing,
University of Amazonas, in Brazil. Thanks a lot for the invitation of
taking part in this forum.

Together with Eduardo Cerqueira, University of Pará, also taking part in
this forum, we wrote an internal project which main goal is to learn how
DTN technology can be deployed to the riparian communities in the Amazon
region, providing support to the design and implementation of a robust, yet
reliable communication infrastructure, with access to the Internet. Long
distances among the Amazon cities connected by large rivers through a dense
forest of towering trees justify such a project. The social exclusion of
its population is estimated around 70%. The idea is to investigate advanced
technologies that can support the development of a communication system
based on DTN technology, for a hostile environment, dense forest, high
humidity levels.

We selected six riparian communities located in the Sustainable Reserve of
Tupé, 30 Km away from Manaus since they represent a typical Amazon scenario
with no efficient communication system, and are not so far from our
university (consider traveling some days by boat to achieve other cities).
The boats crossing the river around the reserve will carry messages
exchanged among the schools and communities. In order to improve the
reachability of the content dissemination inside the reserve, we will model
the behavior of the local people to build a realistic mobility model that
feed simulation models to evaluate alternatives. Inside the communities,
Android-based mobile configured to operate in DTN mode will disseminate the
messages.

Applications and services definition thought for this project with high
priority are health, transport, education, and environment. A prime focus
will be the delivery of videolectures, considered as a powerful tool for
people with reading difficulties.

I would like to receive suggestions or hear other experiences that can
improve such a challenging task.

Regards,

Edjair Mota

---

From: Arjuna Sathiaseelan <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Jan 2014 11:37:16 +0000

Hello Edjair,

Thanks for your reply..

So this is a nice example where the current Internet is far stretched
and where traditional access tech fails.

So are there any LOS challenges for doing long range WiFi? Do you have
any info on the spectrum issues in these areas? Whether something like
White Space could be an ideal solution?

All,

This discussion actually leads me to Scott Burleigh's Ring road idea :
http://www.ipnsig.org/reports/RingRoad.pdf

Would be interested to know what would be the challenges in deploying
such a network for emergency/vital communications: funded by
governments/NGOs who link up to the network..

Would be good to get some thoughts from folks from Google.org about
the project loon too..

Regards
Arjuna

On 9 January 2014 09:05, Edjair Mota <[email-masked]> wrote:
> University of Amazonas, in Brazil. Thanks a lot for the invitation of taking
> part in this forum.
>
> this forum, we wrote an internal project which main goal is to learn how DTN
> technology can be deployed to the riparian communities in the Amazon region,
> providing support to the design and implementation of a robust, yet reliable
> communication infrastructure, with access to the Internet. Long distances
> among the Amazon cities connected by large rivers through a dense forest of
> towering trees justify such a project. The social exclusion of its
> population is estimated around 70%. The idea is to investigate advanced

---

From: Arjuna Sathiaseelan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2014 16:34:07 +0000

forwarding the reply..

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Edjair Mota <[email-masked]>
Date: 13 January 2014 14:50
Subject: Re: [gaia] Time for exploring new Internet architectures?
To: Arjuna Sathiaseelan <[email-masked]>

On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 12:37 PM, Arjuna Sathiaseelan
<[email-masked]> wrote:
> So are there any LOS challenges for doing long range WiFi?

Pretty much. The sustainable reserve we selected for the project is
around 38 km away, and the idea is to extend the results to other
communities along the rivers, and our vision is that maintenance for
such an infrastructure would be prohibitive.

> Do you have

The biggest Brazilian TV operator cover 98.6% of the Amazon Region,
and I think it could be a suitable though challenging solution.

Regards,

Edjair