Serge Fdida

University Pierre et Marie Curie – Paris – France

The ONELAB experimentally-driven approach to explore the future Internet

Current networking technology is built around the Internet Protocol (IP), a communications standard that is thirty years old. While IP has been very successful, due in large part to its minimalist design, its dominance has made it difficult to experiment with new approaches. In addition, the current Internet is a complex system that evolves rapidly over time. As it will include more diversity and functionality in the future, there is a risk that we miss an efficient and robust design. The main challenge for network research is to develop and anticipate the methodologies and tools to assess the design and assumptions for these systems. We argue that it is of utmost importance to develop a Network Science as well as prepare a framework to conduct experiments for proof-of-concept.

Network Science is by essence multidisciplinary, including but not limited to distributed systems, information theory, queueing systems, signal theory, graph, social sciences to name a few. Moreover, it is when you put all components in interactions that the system will reveal its real nature and structure. These correlations, invariants and laws are hard to isolate and model properly. Theory is necessary for the analysis of components in isolation. Eventually, it can be extended to capture correlation effects as in complex systems. However, the very specific nature of some components or the objective to analyze the system at scale or with heterogeneous components will justify the utilization of a proof-of-concept testbed. The design of the test-bed itself, its deployment and operation is a challenge because of the resources required in developing it, the management cost, the technical challenges to build its components or the sustainability issue. Research problems are related to the tools that have to be embedded in the test-bed, such as virtualization to isolate experiments, monitoring to capture data, benchmarking to control the experiments and associated results, federation to ring some other facilities in context … Other challenges are related to the various technologies that have to be made available to provide diversity and scale. This is the case with wireless components where specific concerns arose such as virtualization of the communication channel. In addition, the test-bed should be made easily accessible for experimentation and therefore, the utility function of the facility has to be high enough whilst the entry cost should be remained low.

The European IST OneLab2 project is addressing some of these ambitious goals in tight association with a similar international effort. It operates PlanetLab Europe, extending PlanetLab service across Europe, and federating with other PlanetLab infrastructures worldwide. It will integrate new features and technologies into the system. In particular, Onelab2 will enhance the testbed-native network monitoring service that supports experiments. Finally, it will cooperate with its potential customers by directly involving pilot projects testing novel ideas under synthetic or real-world situations. OneLab2 will build PLE gateways to unusual, cutting-edge networking environments. And OneLab2 will push forward a federation model such that PLE can serve as a basis for a future highly heterogeneous communications environment.

This talk is presenting the major assumptions, progress and issues for building such a facility.

Biography

Serge FDIDA is a full professor at the University Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris) since 1991. From 1989 to 1995, he was a Full Professor to the University Rene Descartes (Paris). Professor Fdida was a Visiting Scientist at IBM Research during the 1990/91 academic year. His research interests are in the area of content networking, pervasive communication, resource management and performance analysis. He was the chairman (or co-chair) of the following events: IFIP Modelling Techniques and Tools'87, IFIP High Performance Networking'94 (HPN'94), Performance of Data Communication'95 (PCN'95) and European Conference on Multimedia Applications, Services and Techniques'97 (ECMAST'97), Networked Group Communication (NGC'99), IFIP Networking'2000 and Conext’2005. He is or served on the editorial boards of many journals : Computer Communication, SIGCOMM CCR, Computer Networks Journals, Journal of Wireless and Optical Communications, and Annales des Télécommunications. He was on the steering committee of the European FP6 network of Excellence ENEXT. He is the Chair of the Conext Steering Committee.

Serge Fdida has also developed a long experience working with various organizations, including government or research agencies. From 2000 to 2005, Serge Fdida was working part-time as a scientific adviser with CNRS-STIC (French National Scientific Research Center / Information Science & Technology). He was the Vice-President of the french national research network on telecommunications involving academia and industry (RNRT) from 2005 to 2007. Serge Fdida is the coordinator of the IST Onelab project (An Open Networking Laboratory Supporting Communication Network Research Across Heterogeneous Environments).