3'rd SAC-FIRE Workshop
co-located with Autonomics 2008

Contents

1. Scope
2. Program Committee
3. Paper format
4. Submission
5. Important Dates
6. Program
7. Talks and Speakers

Scope

The need for ubiquitous communications demands a comprehensive architecture and innovative solutions for enabling connectivity in all geographic locations and under all network circumstances, including natural or man-made crises.

Commercial organisations and EC projects in the Situated and Autonomic Communications (SAC) area are addressing the challenging conditions at the edges of the network, particularly when infrastructure is limited or compromised. Wireless techniques such as ad-hoc, and efficient protocols for storing and forwarding delay-tolerant messages are needed. Also, inputs from associated social mobility models have a role to play in the choice and tuning of the algorithms.

Delivered or anticipated developments from the Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE) activity (for example, based on Peer-to-Peer or Network Coding) can also provide novel solutions for transferring packet flows for applications no longer based on the traditional client-server pattern of traffic. Papers can describe either "clean-slate" or evolutionary scenarios.

Advanced devices (terminals, sensors, etc.), innovative applications and plans for - or results from - large-scale trials are also relevant for this workshop. Developments that lead to cost reduction or energy saving will be especially welcome.

The workshop will encourage interaction among researchers in the field and will promote the exchange of ideas on the future of the Internet.

We solicit papers addressing theoretical and practical aspects of SAC in areas including, but not limited to:

• Autonomic Communications architectures, network technologies and protocols
• Managing and monitoring resources in Autonomic Communication Networks
• Socio-economic aspects of Autonomic Communication Networks
• QoS in Autonomic Communication Networks
• Analytical models, simulators, trials
• Application implications of Autonomic Communication Networks
• Interaction of Autonomic Communication Networks with legacy networking protocols and grid computing
• Privacy, security and trust models
• Human mobility models

Program Committee

Paper format

• Please prepare your paper using the 2-column ACM format. View the guidelines and templates here, and please read the below instructions.
• Please be sure to use the correct Category and Subject Descriptor in your paper. See the above guidelines for instructions and visit http://www.acm.org/class/1998/ for more information.
• Your paper must be submitted in PDF format. A PDF creator can be downloaded for Windows: here.
• Failure to meet the formatting guidelines set by ACM, could result in your paper not being included in the Proceedings CD.
• The short abstract is allowed up to 1 page, including all figures, tables and references.
• The camera-ready full paper is allowed up to 6 pages, including all figures, tables and references.
• Each paper should contain an abstract of 100 to 150 words that appears at the beginning of the document. Use the same text that is submitted electronically along with the author contact information.

Submission

To submit your contribution to our workshop please use the following email address: sac-autonomics08@create-net.org.

Important Dates

Program

Talks and Speakers

1. Marek Kolodziejski, "The Role of SAC Projects in FIRE and thoughts on Future Directions"
2. Martin Potts, "FIREworks - Supporting the FIRE Activities"
3. Antonio Manzalini, Nermin Brgulja, "Autonomic Ecosystems: experience of the CASCADAS project"
4. Daniele Miorandi, "BIONETS - 'Networkless Networking'"
5. Heiko Pfeffer, "Collaborative Services: Achieving Dynamicity in Large-scale Applications"
6. Yosra Barouni, "Content-centric Routing for Autonomic Networks"
7. Apostolis Kousaridas, "Future Internet Elements: Cognition and Self-management Design Issues"

Below, you find more details to the talks of the people listed above.

Marek Kolodziejski (European Commission)

• Title: The Role of SAC Projects in FIRE and thoughts on Future Directions
• Author(s): 
• Abstract: tbd

Martin Potts (Martel)

• Title: FIREworks - Supporting the FIRE Activities
• Author(s): Susanna Avéssta, Serge Fdida, Anastasius Gavras, Martin Potts
• Abstract: The FIREworks Support Action coordinates and supports the interworking of testbed activities in Europe and their respective connections outside of Europe, mainly to North America and the Far East. FIREworks facilitates and stimulates the strategy development of two dimensions:
  
  • Promoting experimentally-driven, visionary research on new paradigms and networking concepts and architectures for the future internet. What research, what type of testbeds?
  • Building a large-scale experimentation facility to support both medium and long-term research on networks and services by gradually federating existing and new testbeds for emerging or future internet technologies. How to federate?

  FIREworks creates a sustainable forum for testbed actors in the area of the future internet, including networks and services:

  • A FIRE Office will be founded for serving the FIRE Community members in administrative issues, such as maintaining information on testbeds, enabling exchange of information within the Community, organising events, promoting testbeds and their development and raising awareness on FIRE
  • A FIRE Initiative will be launched to continue the work specified and started in the project

  The aim of FIREworks is to deliver required information between stakeholders, and specifically, between projects about the needs, prerequisites and criteria for experimentally driven research, and a roadmap for a European large-scale experimentation facility. FIREworks charts a map of testbed activities in Europe and studies their conditions for federation, acquiring understanding on the depth of possible and reasonable federation in the rich and diversified field of testing activities on new paradigms and networking concepts and architectures for the future internet.

  The ultimate objective of the FIREworks SA is to ensure both tighter collaboration of testbeds with the aim to improve overall testing features and provision of a higher number of testing services in Europe

• The Speaker: Martin Potts has a degree in Electronic Engineering and has spent his entire career in the telecommunications business. He worked previously for Plessey (UK), British Telecom (UK) and Ascom (CH). Whilst at British Telecom, he participated in the RACE Definition Phase, and joined his first EU project (R1022: Technology for ATD) in 1989. Martin became the Chairman of the so-called "Project Line 8" in the RACE Programme, in which all the projects active in the area of "Test Infrastructure and Interworking" were grouped.
  
  

  In the ACTS Programme, he was the Chairman of the Chain: "Global Network Interoperability", the Chain Group: "Network Level Interoperability and Management", and the Cluster of 8 IP/ATM projects.

  From 2003 - 2006 he assisted Cisco in the management of the FP5-IST project "6NET" and, in FP6, assisted Telefonica in the management of the IP QoS project "EuQoS" and Thomson in the management of the autonomic communications project "Haggle". He also co-ordinated the IPv6 dissemination project "6DISS". In FP7, he is currently co-ordinating the IPv6 deployment support project "6DEPLOY". He has also consulted recently for Kenya Telcom regarding the provision of Universal Service across the country.

  Martin is a regular presenter on NGN and IP QoS topics in EU-ICT and commercial conferences, for example: BBEurope, IQPC, OpenNet.

  He was the chairman of the BB4All Cluster of IST projects and has been rapporteur for the FP7 consultation events: "Internet of Things" and the "Future Infrastructure for Research in Europe (FIRE)"

Antonio Manzalini (Telecom Italia)

• Title: Autonomic Ecosystems: experience of the CASCADAS project
• Author(s): Antonio Manzalini, Nermin Brgulja
• Abstract: Information Society increasingly depends on Telecommunications, ICT and Internet for some of its most important functions. However, today's network and service platforms are too static, brittle and not future-proof, due in large part to the quality of the underlying s/w technologies and architectures. Moreover current service dynamics are providing clear signs that blurring the borders between Telecommunications, ICT and Future Internet may open a new era of innovation and socio-economic progress for the Information Society. Development of Autonomic Ecosystems may pave the way to this innovation. Presentation will elaborate on highly decentralized multi-components environments for providing dynamic and efficient service composition and execution whilst allowing scalable gathering and aggregation of data, information and digital contents. Moreover the experience of the project Cascadas will be shortly presented and a demonstration of the Cascadas tool-kit will be shown (Nermin Brgulja, University of Kassel).
• Slides: PDF
• The Speaker: Antonio Manzalini received a Dr. Ing. degree in electronic engineering from the Politecnico of Turin (Italy). In 1990 he joined Telecom Italia Lab (formerly CSELT). He started with RT&D activities on technologies and architectures for advanced networking. He has been awarded 5 patents on networking and services systems and methods. He was author of a book on network synchronization and his results has been published in several technical papers and publications. He was active in the ITU standardization as Rapporteur (1997-2000) of two ITU-T Questions. He has been actively involved in several EURESCOM and European Project. He run as Project Manager (2000-2002) the FP5 IST Project LION "Layers Interworking in Optical Networks". He run as Project Manager (2002-2004) the FP6 IST Integrated Project NOBEL whose main goal was to discover and validate innovative and flexible networks enabling broadband services for all. In 2003 he was appointed as member of the Scientific Committee of CTTC (Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya). On 2006 he has been appointed as Project Leader of the FP6 FET ICT Project CASCADAS "Component-ware for Autonomic, Situation-aware Communications And Dynamically Adaptable Services" whose main goal is developing and demonstrating an architectural vision for autonomic ecosystems based on self-organised distributed components. In 2008 he has been awarded with the International Certification of Project Manager by PMI. Currently he is joining the long term reseach activities of the Future Centre of Telecom Italia.

Daniele Miorandi (CREATE-NET)

• Title: BIONETS - 'Networkless Networking'
• Author(s): Daniele Miorandi
• Abstract: In this presentation, we will present some of the networking-related activities carried out within the framework of the EC-funded BIONETS project. In particular, we will present the "Disappearing Networking" concept developed by the project consortium. This concept builds on two pillars. First, the "physical" disappearance of the network as a separate entity, exploiting opportunistic communications to support viral propagation of information and data. Second, the disappearance of network protocols as static entities, replaced by a dynamic service-oriented architecture.
• The Speaker: Daniele Miorandi is the head of the Pervasive Area at CREATE-NET, Italy. He received a PhD in Communications Engineering from Univ. of Padova, Italy in 2005, and a Laurea degree (summa cum lauda) in Communications Engineering from Univ. of Padova, Italy, in 2001. He joined CREATE-NET in Jan. 2005, where he is leading a group working on Pervasive Computing and Communication Environments. His research interests include bio-inspired approaches to networking and service provisioning in large-scale computing systems, modelling and performance evaluation of wireless networks, wireless extensions of fieldbus systems, prototyping of wireless mesh solutions. He is currently the coordinator of the EC-funded BIONETS project. He is serving on the PC and SC of various events in networking and pervasive computing, and has authored more than 70 papers in internationally referred journals and conferences in the field.

Heiko Pfeffer (TU Berlin)

• Title: Collaborative Services: Achieving Dynamicity in Large-scale Applications
• Author(s): Heiko Pfeffer
• Abstract: In order to enable a high degree of flexibility, reusability of software components, and request processing within teams, large-scale application are increasingly realized by multiple services together with respective control structures defining their execution order and internal message passing. This proceeding is commonly referred to as service composition. Within the scope of BIONETS, means for the dynamic modification and adaptation of those service compositions is researched in order to make applications responsive to environmental changes. Therefore, an approach for the dynamic transformation of service compositions is introduced that applies genetic operators on service compositions' control structures.
• The Speaker: Heiko Pfeffer studied Computer Science at the Rheinische-Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn (Germany) and the Université Claude Bernard Lyon I (France). After graduation, he started to work as scientific researcher at the group of Open Communication Systems (OKS) at the Technische Universität Berlin and Fraunhofer Institut FOKUS. His main research areas comprise the modeling of service collaboration and interaction within service oriented computing environments and the mobile Web. He has been involved in multiple national and international projects within the area of service oriented architectures, mobile computing, and technologies for future Web applications.

Yosra Barouni (Université Pierre et Marie Curie)

• Title: Content-centric Routing for Autonomic Networks
• Author(s): Yosra Barouni and Promethee Spathis
• Abstract: This work is part of the european project ANA (Autonomic Network Architecture, see http://www.ana-project.org). It is a project that aims to define and implement a novel, flexible and extensible network architecture to interconnect and federate multiple heterogeneous networks in an autonomic way.
  

  One of the major issues raised by the project is the routing issue. In fact, as the autonomic networks are aimed to be a federation of multiple and heterogeneous networks, the classical naming, addressing and routing schemes used in each network are not compatible with each others. Host centric routing becomes then a problem in this context. That's why we propose to think of a different kind of routing which is totally based on the content/data information and makes abstraction of the specific addresses and names.

  Our proposed filtering algorithm has many interesting properties like the self-configuration and the independence of the addressing and naming schemes. Its hop-by-hop nature allows to take into account the updates of both topology information and content descriptions. This property turns out to be also useful in the case of large-scale networks where it is difficult to have a global knowledge about more than one-step neighbours.

  Finally, to validate our protocol, we present the Java-based prototype we developed. The prototype has the particularity of being modular. By this way, each module can be easily reconfigured and updated when it is necessary. The prototype modularity allows also the nodes to auto-deploy the modules that interest them.

Apostolis Kousaridas (University of Athens)

• Title: Future Internet Elements: Cognition and Self-management Design Issues
• Author(s): A. Kousaridas, C. Polychronopoulos, N. Alonistioti, J. Mödeker, A. Marikar, K. Jonas, A. Mihailovic, G. Agapiou and I. Chochliouros
• Abstract: The technological progress of the last decades will continue to drive the usage of the Internet but, in parallel, it has brought the current Internet infrastructure to its design limits. The current Internet is divided into thousands of inter-dependent systems that are managed by a single network operator, while common address space and routing algorithms are the main mechanisms that allow systems' interaction and cooperation.
  
  

  The deployment of advanced services and the introduced mobility have increased the demand for a highly scalable, reconfigurable and dynamic service provisioning network infrastructure and caused concern for operators familiar with the fixed and predictable pre-assigned parameters and structures of traditional networks.

  The various requirements of the new services (e.g. traffic increase) make the prediction and planning difficult and give a lot of challenges to the operators in terms of expanding and managing the network.

  The area of the future Internet is considered as a representative example of a complex adaptive organization, where the involved partners have conflicting goals and tension to maximize their gains. Several elements, with various computational capabilities and network resources, are interconnected, constantly acting in parallel, and reacting to the operations of other elements.

  This evolution renders imperative the need for adaptable and scalable systems that operate in unpredictable environments, having self-management features and the ability to handle complexity. There is a need for new ways to organize, control and structure communication systems, according to new management schemes and networking techniques without neglecting the advantages of the current Internet. The future Internet should be open for further and continuous improvement, without the necessity of another disruptive modification in the future.

  In this direction the Distributed and Layered Cognitive Cycle paradigm (Monitoring, Decision Making, and Execution) is introduced in this paper. Based on this concept, new techniques to organize and control communications systems are proposed, focusing on: Network Management at various scales of the communication systems and dynamic composition of functional modules.

  A conceptual architecture is described in order to form synergies, by decomposing management at various scales of a communication system. Synergies explain the formation and self-organization of multiple cognitive elements that act locally in open systems, in a collaborative manner, for a common global purpose. Embedded cognitive mechanisms at all scales of a communication system enable its autonomous hypostasis, facilitating also its self-organization.

  Furthermore, this paper proposes to split the functions of nowadays protocols (e.g., TCP), into functional protocol elements, and use these features (e.g., flow control, ARQ and congestion control) in independent combinations, according to the requirements of the application or network environment. The deployed functionality can change at each hop.

  This work is part of the European Self-NET Project (http://www.ict-selfnet.eu/)

• The Speaker: is research associate in the Department of Informatics & Telecommunications at the University of Athens and he currently works towards his PhD on cognitive and adaptive communications systems. He received his B.Sc. degree in Informatics and his M.Sc. degree in Information Systems from the Department of Informatics at Athens University of Economics and Business.
  

  He has worked as a software engineer for the "Greek Research and Technology Network" (GRNET) on the "GEANT2 Advance Multi-domain Provisioning System (AMPS) project" as well as for the department of Information Systems Design at the Hellenic Railways Organization. He holds an "Ericsson Award of Excellence in Telecommunications" for his M.Sc. Thesis and a performance scholarship from the Greek National Scholarship Foundation. Since mid-2005, he serves as a research associate at the University of Athens, in the context of FP6 E2R (End-to-End Reconfigurability) phase I and II, FP7 E3 (End-to-End Efficiency) and FP7 Self-NET (Self-Management of Cognitive Future InterNET Elements) EU-funded projects. His main areas of interest are complex self-organizing networks, network economics, e-commerce, and mobile services.