Subject: [gaia] Notes (Part I) from yesterday's meeting

From: Arjuna Sathiaseelan <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 7 Mar 2014 09:18:00 +0000

Dear All,
   Thanks to everyone who came in yesterday. It was a full house (see
pic attached) and am glad that we managed to get all the speakers and
the agenda done on time (late by 20 mins) :).

Matt Ford took the notes but he had to leave early and we had another
note taker (Aaron?).

I have also added some info into Matt's notes and the notes from
Session 1 and 2 are here. I will email the notes from Session 3 and
conclusion in another email later.

-----------------

Agenda

3:00-3:10 - Welcome, Chairs (Arjuna Sathiaseelan and Warren Kumari)

Arjuna - we are here to address the billions that don't have Internet access
Don't want to have a debate about human rights, it is clear that
Internet is important for fundamental social activities. Ref ISOC
report. Need to understand why has 3+ more decades of progressive
research failed to address the challenges of enabling universal
connectivity. where are the problems? and how can we solve it
"together"?

Lars - discussed Arjuna's work and possible ties to IRTF. Offered the
meeting, Crowcroft came up with the acronym. Intent is to form an IRTF
RG. It may be unusual RG but that's fine. Criteria are people do
interesting work and don't feel like it was a waste of time, that's
fine. Chartering - make a proposal, spend a year acting like an RG,
we'll provide rooms and after a year we'll see whether it actually
seems to be working. DOn't worry too much about formal charter. We can
worry about that in a year. IRTF does follow IETF IPR disclosure
rules. They're pretty straightforward. We don't need to discuss
licensing.

Mat Ford - question for Arjuna - you said 'we need to solve economic,
social, policy problems' - do you mean 'they need to be solved' or
that you expect to address these challenges in this group?

Arjuna - Need a place to document the challenges - we are lacking a
place to document the diverse challenges. Want a dissemination forum.

Warren - *jokingly* -yes, we are planning on solving all the problems everywhere

Session 1: Deployment Experiences

3:10-3:20 - IXP Deployment Experiences in Africa - Michuki Mwangi, ISOC

80% is social challenge and 20% is technological! protocol to fix
social engineering challenge of capacity building would be valuable :)

3:20-3:30 - Caching and the local content equation - Mike Blanche, Google

50 million people per year coming within reach of a fibre node in Africa
Cross-border fibre is a political challenge - wireless towers
sometimes used to bridge the gap.

3:35-3:40 - Enabling Affordability, Ensuring Development - Kojo Boakye, A4AI

3:40-3:50 - Internet Deployment Experiences from NSRC - Steve Huter &
Hervey Allen, NSRC

Common take: Both Kojo and Steve emphasized there are several
challenges: social, policy, regulatory, technology etc. Steve
emphasized capacity building is extremely important and highlighted
NSRC's work in this space. Kojo highlighted A4AI's goals and
activities. Also suggested reading the recent Affordability report.

3:50-4:00 - Understanding broadband performance - A Network Operator's
Perspective - Dr. Achilles Petras, BT
Provided an operators take on broadband performance, how Quality of
Service is measured, what are the factors that affect latency and
hence quality of experience.

4:00-4:15 - Q & A

mike o'riordan - exchair of maawg - when you get bandwidth you don't
just get good things, you also get baaaad things. working on mobile
malware spam etc. we work where members are, so not in africa. we've
spawned an org called mobile malware anti-abuse foundation - funded by
comcast and google - idea is to provide anti-abuse training in
emerging economies. engineers don't know how to deal with abuse using
free tools. m3aaf.org - looking to do training on the ground, we'll be
looking to raise additional funding. joe st.sauver has us in contact
with nsrc. we don't want to see a repetition of all the bad stuff
we've seen over the years as internet expands in africa.

jon crowcroft - a couple of other bad things that are more recent.
african experience mirrors european experience of 20 years ago
regarding cross-border connectivity. outcome of that is that
surveillance happens in the US. we have some boxes in a pakistani ISP
and also syria investigating chilling effect of excessive censorship.
similar issues arising in the UK now. over-blocking issues are a
growing problem. how do we help support the right technologies, and
not blocking, and not doing it via places that want to snoop on the
data.

aaron kaplan - comment on spam problem. i work for cert - i see lots
of botnets etc. - still i would opt in to more spam if that would get
me better connectivity to some places in the world. not sure what to
do about the surveillance question.

Session 2: Architectures

4:15-4:25 - TAQ: Enhancing Fairness and Performance Predictability in
Small Packet Regimes, Jay Chen, New York University

Highlighted that many users sometime share a low capacity link e.g
school in Amritapuri in Kerala where 200 users simultaneously shared a
2Mbps link. Current browsers open up multiple parallel TCP connections
and this causes extreme congestion >10% loss rates driving TCP
performance into sub packet regimes where the fair share is less than
1 packet/RTT. This is an important phenomena that needs to be
addressed. Active Queue management does not solve. Admission control
needs to be in place as well as well as fined grained packet drops and
a mechanism to prioritise retransmitted packets.

4:25-4:35 - Less-than-Best-Effort Service for Community Wireless
Networks: Challenges at Three Layers - Michael Welzl, University of
Oslo
How do we enable less than best effort service effectively over the
three layers: transport, network and link layer when a home user
shares his home broadband with his neighbour who does not have
(because he cannot afford to). What are the challenges? There are
methods like LEDBAT which could be looked at but still needs a lot of
engineering and not yet useful. Layer 3 small packets can be costly in
terms of energy use aggregation and tunnelling?

4:35-4:45 - From an always-on Internet to one that is almost surely
off - Dirk Trossen, InterDigital?

Why do we need to have an always-on Internet? Several challenges exist
in reality: energy efficiency, geographical challenges as well as
economical. Blueprint for an always on Internet was presented
combining the benefits of Information Centric networking, Delay
tolerant networking and IP utilising all dimensions of resources:
computing, storage and communications effectively. How this
architecture could optimise resource usage was also discussed.

4:45-4:55 - Q & A
No questions

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

---

From: "Adrian Farrel" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2014 11:39:17 -0000

Thanks, Arjuna, for the notes. They give me a flavour of the meeting that I
would have liked to attend (time to give up being an AD and do real work?).

Hope this venue is firmly established and we can make some significant progress.

Adrian

> -----Original Message-----
> From: gaia [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Arjuna Sathiaseelan
> Sent: 07 March 2014 09:18
> To: gaia
> Subject: [gaia] Notes (Part I) from yesterday's meeting
> 
> Dear All,