Motivation and Objectives

The basic Internet and wireless networking technologies have experienced a remarkable growth in the last decade. This growth has been motivated by exciting and potentially economically viable services and markets and has been enabled by advancements in key technologies. While traditional networking technologies have had their large share in enabling such advancements, it is widely believed that technologies once in the periphery of networking have assumed an important role and they are increasingly becoming part of the networking technologies. For instance, the support of multimedia-based content management and transport and full-scale mobility of users and services, have required significant advancements in both traditional networking as well as related technologies. Such advancements have led to a rather complex networking landscape that sometimes is driven by the desire to develop quickly a particular service-enabling technology that does not reveal sufficiently well the fundamental underlying new technologies or does not base such developments on the more fundamental principles with an apparent impact on both complexity and performance.

There are two main objectives of the workshop. The first is to discuss and try to shed some more light into key, new and upcoming networking technologies by focusing on the driving fundamental aspects and principles. A better understanding could help better steer the upcoming advancements with the expected benefits in reduced complexity, improved performance and enhanced services. The targeted participation of high quality researchers - as elaborated more in another section - is key to achieving this objective.

The second main objective is to give the opportunity to the networking communities in Europe and USA to get together and have a first hand exposure on the advancements and strengths in the other side of the Atlantic. It is widely understood that there are quite distinct strengths and weaknesses in either side of the Atlantic and, consequently, both communities will benefit from the exposure and the potential future interactions. The targeted balance in the participation of researchers from the two sides of the Atlantic will help achieve this cross-fertilization objective, bring the benefits to both communities and help advance the technology.

As funding is a major driving force, another objective of this workshop is to provide a forum that could help the workshop-sponsoring funding agencies from the EU and USA identify the key and required networking technologies and direct their funding accordingly. The emphasis of the workshop on the fundamental aspects of the key, new and upcoming networking technologies represented by the most qualified researchers in either side of the Atlantic will help in this direction as well.

 

Workshop Focus Areas

The Internet has been growing in size, scope and complexity. The proposed workshop will attempt to answer some of the basic questions such as: How can we model the large-scale nature and the multi-level decentralized control of the Internet? How can we design protocols that work well in wireless and hybrid wired/wireless networks? What are the consequences of building competing overlay services on top of IP?

The proposed workshop will ask invited speakers to focus on the fundamental aspects of current trends and challenges ahead in the near future of the Internet. The scope of the workshop is intentionally broad. It is not meant to be a forum for the presentation of results on specific topics. Rather, to answer the challenging broad questions posed above, the workshop will focus on fundamental approaches as well as approaches that cut across traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Key networking areas represented by the best researchers from EU and USA will be targeted. The focus of the workshop may be divided into three broad themes:

The Internet has grown immensely in a short period of time. This exponential growth has taken protocol designers by surprise. Many of the important issues, such as convergence and stability of routing and congestion control protocols, are yet to be effectively addressed. Some of the significant related challenges that are expected to be discussed in the workshop are: developing a unified approach that captures controls at various levels of the architecture; developing cost-based models for understanding how the Internet topology and traffic grow; developing dynamical models for understanding the convergence/stability of IP routing and TCP. 

The Internet is being extended with diverse technologies, which makes it hard to develop end-to-end protocols that work well in such hybrid setting. Some of the difficulties expected to be discussed in the proposed workshop include: inferring different congestion levels, as well as non-congestion losses such as those found in wireless networks; handling asymmetric channels such as those in one-way satellite links; understanding the impact of GMPLS-enabled clouds on the end-to-end path.

As IP started as an overlay on top of telephone leased lines, overlay networks are being developed over the Internet today. Some of the issues that need to be better understood are: the impact of building such competing overlay networks on top of IP; the knowledge that can be gained from lower-layer protocols (e.g., routing) when building such overlay networks (e.g., peer-to-peer); the structure of these overlay networks and mechanisms to effectively model them.

The expected proliferation of WLAN technologies, the increasing installed infrastructure for (low bit) data services over wireless Wide Area Networks (WANs) and the emergence of 3G-and-beyond high-BW WAN technologies, open up new possibilities and challenges. Services traditionally delivered only over wired-networks are now becoming feasible over wireless networks or may be effectively designed for them; furthermore, new services that are generated by the mobility of the users are emerging.The limited resources (BW, storage, processing, power) that typically characterize mobile users, the mobility itself, the effective coordination and usage of WLAN, wireless WAN, 3G-and-beyond and the wired Internet technologies pose important challenges that the workshop is expected to also discuss.

The above list is just a sample of the kind of issues that the workshop will focus on. The precise focus will be determined by the makeup of the participants.

Impact

By bringing together most of the best people in networking from USA and EU and providing a forum for the presentation of both fundamental aspects and trends in networking, the workshop is expected to have an impact in a number of ways. 

·Researchers will obtain an enhanced perspective on current aspects in networking both within and outside their area of focus and be stimulated to pursue open problems of importance.

·Existing strengths in EU or USA will provide the opportunity to the other side to promote its position and take advantage of the already achieved advances.

·Opportunities for collaborations between researchers from both sides are expected to arise. Such interactions may potentially lead to substantial advancements as diverse strengths and traditions will meet.

·The workshop-sponsoring funding agencies from the EU and USA will enhance their understanding of the fundamentals in networking, as well as become aware of the current trends and open problems in networking and direct their funding efforts accordingly.