Last week I had the chance to participate in this year’s edition of the IEEE Infocom conferences in the “cidade maravilhosa” of Rio de Janeiro!
Great location, great technical program, and great panel discussion and keynotes. The first day there was an excellent tutorial on sensor networks by Jim Kurose, free of charge thanks to the conference sponsors!
From the panel on Clean Slate Architectures: Where Are We Today, And What Is The Path Forward?
My opinion on clean slate research continues the same: it does not presume clean slate deployment and aims at innovation through questioning the fundamentals withou the constraints of the currently deployed architecture. Recommended introductory reading by Prof. A. Feldman: Internet Clean-Slate Design: What and Why? and my information-centric perspective to future Internet design:
More to take home from Infocom (besides the papers, the promotional books by Pearson, and the calories from the churrascaria “Porcao”):
Talks:
- Nick McKeown, “Software-defined Networking”
- Jim Kurose, “10 Things I Wish My Advisor Had Told Me, ,”
And from my notes of the panel on What Are The Hot Topics in Networking?
Prof. Keith Ross was IMO the one who pointed out the two most interesting trends (I am not that into wireless currently):
1.- The marriage of social networks and P2P: How to enrich / enhance p2p overlays with existing social networks to exploit, proximity, trust and security?
2.- Data center networking: A lot to do to in terms of architecting the large energy-hungry networking infrastructure of data centers. Splitting TCP connections at the front-end, load balancing, intelligent wiring, cost reduction, avoiding bottlenecks (network and I/O), etc… I hope his ppt will be available soon online. Look at SIGCOMM 2008 papers on data center designs to see what kind of research is going on, and more papers in this line are expected in this year’s SIGCOMM.
There was lots of discussion on what are good topics for PhD research. Confirming some of my late suspects, and in contradiction to my previous post on network coding, network coding was considered a topic losing temperature. The practical / killer deployments are not emerging, and for wired scenarios the applications of pure network coding are still yet to be proven effective and efficient to be worth.
For more on cold topics in network: Jon Crowcroft, “Cold Topics in Networking”
and by googling for the link I found a promising material of a recent workshop held by Jon Crowcroft covering research issues and methodology.
I quite agree on the opinion on network coding. At least for the use of internet, network coding is not that efficient due to the star-style network topology below the network layer. Moreover it is so hard to upgrade the existing infrastructure and enable multicasting. In wireless environment for most of time it is naturally broadcasting, network coding is not getting too much gain.