Subject: Call for participation for possible IRTF Network Virtualization Research Group

From: "Martin Stiemerling" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2008 15:09:43 +0100

Hi,

This might interesting for the l1/l2/l3 vpn and vrrp people.

You may have received the below email some days ago. The feedback to this email was very positive, i.e., there has been feedback from interested researchers in the US, Canada, Asia, and Europe.   

If you are interested you can
- visit this web site http://www.net.informatik.uni-goettingen.de/nvrg/ and
- subscribe to the discussion mailing list at https://listserv.gwdg.de/mailman/listinfo/nvrg. 

The mailing list's address is [email-masked]

The meeting at the IETF (BAR BOF style in IETF speak) is on 
    WEDNESDAY, March 12, 2008 
    1510-1700 Afternoon Session II and beyond
    Meeting room: to be announced.

The agenda will be posted on the web site.

Thanks,

  Martin

Several research initiatives in the area of "Future Internet" have recently started in the US, Europe, and Asia. Amongst them are, for instance, GENI/FIND [1], 4WARD [2], Trilogy [3], and NICT's New Generation Network projects [4]. All these efforts possible lead to an internetworking architecture with the support of network virtualization that significantly provides more flexible features than the current Internet. 

Network virtualization follows the same principle as any known computer virtualization technology, such as virtual memory, virtual hard disk, virtual screens, etc. It is always an abstraction from a real resource, hiding the underlying complexity (cf. [5]). But even if virtualization is an integral part of today's computing technology (which is close to communication technology), it is still lacking a counterpart in the Internet architecture. Current proposals discuss possible virtualization techniques (e.g. [7]) on top the today's Internet (also past techniques such as MBONE and related), or more general on a substrate [6]. The clean slate approach [9] also considers network virtualization as an integral part of the future Internet. 

However, all of these activities are bound to each local community, but there is no larger, international discussion (apart from some smaller meetings, e.g.,  between Ambient Network and GENI/FIND [10].  All of currently discussed ideas are somewhat heading towards different directions (especially different between academia and industry research). Thus it would be beneficial to have a venue for discussing ideas w.r.t. network virtualization as a new means for the Internet today, as transition path to new technologies, or as integral part of the future Internet would be beneficial. Researchers from US, Europe, and Asia could discuss what exactly network virtualization could bring as benefit, how it is impacting the Internet, and what might be the impact to the Internet architecture.  

Therefore, I have in mind a venue where researchers can discuss their ideas (w/o considering standardization/interfaces definitions yet) and try to shape a way forward for future Internet activities in this field. The Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) can be good place to give this a home. 

The intention of this email is to first gather community feedback about whether researchers do find this idea of creating an IRTF research group (RG) appealing enough and have energy enough to actively participate in such a group. 

The envisioned main goals of such a RG in the area of network virtualization can be:
- a discussion venue without standardization or any other limiting boundaries
- bringing together the right people from US, Asia and Europe

Open issues to be addressed by this RG are, but not limited to:
- impact of network virtualization to the Internet architecture as such, Internet devices (routers and hosts), and applications running in the Internet;
- can network virtualization solve the ossification issue (cf. [6] of the Internet or is it just shifting problems from one place to another;
- are overlays one possible answer to network virtualization;
- are the current testbed initiatives (e.g., PlanetLab, OneLab, etc) a first answer to network virtualization?

Interested people are requested to reply to this email and if possible to meet at the upcoming IETF meeting (IETF#71) in Philadelphia to discuss further steps. A possible meeting slot during the IETF meeting would be Wednesday after the IETF Operations and Administration Plenary. However, I'm open for suggestions.

References:

[1]   GENI project web page, http://www.geni.net
[2]   4ward project page, http://ww.4ward-project.eu
[3]   EU FP7 IST Trilogy project, http://www.trilogy-project.org
[4]   NICT's NWGN projects, http://akari-project.nict.go.jp/document/INFOCOM2007.pdf
[5]	L. Peterson, S. Shenker and J. Turner, Overcoming the Internet Impasse through Virtualization, Hotnets 2004.
[6]	J. Turner and D. Taylor, Diversifying the Internet, Proceedings of Globecom 2005.
[7]	J. Touch, Y. Wang, L. Eggert, , and G. Finn, A Virtual Internet Architecture, ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Future Directions in Network Architecture, 2003. Karlsruhe, Germany.
[8]	Larry Peterson, Tom Anderson, Dan Blumenthal, Dean Casey, David Clark, Deborah Estrin, Joe Evans, Dipankar Raychaudhuri, Mike Reiter, Jennifer Rexford, Scott Shenker, and John Wroclawski, "GENI design principles," in IEEE Computer, September 2006
[9]  Clean slate project, http://cleanslate.stanford.edu [10] ftp://ftp.cordis.europa.eu/pub/ist/docs/ct/internet-of-the-future-cluster_en.pdf

With kind regards,

  Martin Stiemerling

NEC Laboratories Europe  & University of Goettingen

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