Subject: [gaia] Part 2- GAIA Meeting Notes

From: Arjuna Sathiaseelan <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 9 Mar 2014 11:46:21 +0000

All,
  Last of the GAIA notes is here. As we didnt have the notes - so I am
writing it down from my head (apologies).

Session 3: Research Project Experiences

4:55-5:05 Internet Access Requirements: a view from the IU-‐ATC
project - Prof Saleem Bhatti, University of St. Andrews
Saleem spoke about the IU-ATC project - 5 year project funded by the
UK-India research initiative. Mandatory to understand what users want:
agriculture, health, education apps. Voice and video are key apps in
rural areas due to poor literacy + many languages (around 100?). Apps
should be able to utilise all possible connectivity options
(mobility/multipath) as well as be adaptive to variable connectivity.
Privacy/security is important to consider. Important to consider
energy - not just sufficient to have efficiency in hardware but also
in system protocols/designs.

5:05-5:15 - Liberouter - Towards Do-It-Yourself Networking - Prof
Joerg Ott, Aalto University
Joerg presented a networking platform (wifi router, scampi platform,
captive portal + storage) that utilises opportunistic networking with
a pub/sub paradigm that enables localised communications. Enables
content to be shared locally rather than to access the cloud. Also has
capability to host localised apps store (apps to search for
people/content  etc).

5:15-5:25 - Virtual Public Networks - Prof Panagiotis Papadimitriou,
University of Hannover
Panagiotis presented a new software defined abstraction for managing
wireless networks. Discussed the technical challenges that are being
addressed by the project. Spoke about how VPuN could be used in the
context of the Public Access Wifi Service (PAWS) project where home
broadband users share the home broadband connecting with the public
for free. Arjuna added that the idea of VPuN is to decouple CAPEX and
OPEX so that we can a third party stakeholder who can manage the
network etc.

5:25-5:30 -Funkfeur.at and Community Wireless Networks, Aaron Kaplan, Funkfeuer
Aaron spoke about the Funkfeuer network. Spoke about how it started
and described its growth. There are many challenges still to be solved
- needs more Layer 2 work. Happy to write a draft and submit it to
GAIA.

5:30- 5:40 - Q & A
Questions about Liberouter was asked. Someone from Moracco (ISOC
fellow) said DTN is great and we need more like this in mainstream
deployment. Nalini from ? pointed out that we need technological
solutions that consider social requirements. Martin Koyabe also
highlighted that social requirements is an important factor to
consider in designing technological solutions.

Security threats on PAWS was also discussed. When homeusers share
their home network who is responsible for illegal browsing? Arjuna
said that at the moment we run VPN tunnels to an endpoint managed by a
third party (e.g. local council) knows who is accessing what - ofcom
mentions sharing home broadband connections are illegal! -- but we
have seen from PAWS - this has been an useful method of enabling your
neighbour who cant afford to connect - to connect. Incentive models
were also discussed - arjuna said the reason why someone would share
is that the local council can do a small amount of tax rebate to the
household and also pays for the network operator for unused capacity
(so incentive for network operator to utilise its unused capacity) -
so the incentive for the local council is that the digital by default
states that the UK govt can save £3bn/year by getting people online
and accessing their govt services.

Dirk Kutscher and Dirk Trossen pointed out that we need to make some
clearer references to future 5G efforts since some of the
tech/economics of 5G are relevant to GAIA.

5:40-6:00 - Discussion of proposed charter and future plans
Finally the charter was discussed - happy with charter but questions
asked on the sort of topics that we could take up. Nishanth Sastry
from KCL asked whether we can address the social challenges - arjuna
said yes the group is exploratory and open to all. We need to bring to
the forum all related problems, so that we can encourage
collaborations to work together to solve some of the problems  and
then possibly document them. Lars pointed out documentation can be any
from informational/experimental RFCs to research papers to sticking
leaflets on the trees! :) Warren asked whether the audience are keen
to see GAIA as a Research group- and the consensus was a "yes".

Next set of plans was discussed with a followup meeting -- one
possible venue could be the African Broadband forum which the CTO can
arrange. This needs to be planned.

Also CTO, A4AI and NSRC said they are happy to support GAIA on related
activities. CTO can promote GAIA across its member states.

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

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From: "Steven G. Huter" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 9 Mar 2014 05:18:56 -0700 (PDT)

> activities. CTO can promote GAIA across its member states.

Thank you, Arjuna, Lars, Jon and Warren, for organizing and facilitating 
the inaugural meeting of the IRTF GAIA group.

Steven Huter, Director
Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC)
http://nsrc.org/