INFOCOM 2007 PANELS

Panel 1: Clean-slate designs for a future Internet

Moderator: Darleen Fisher, National Science Foundation

Panelists:

Darleen Fisher, National Science Foundation, USA

David Clark, MIT, USA

Tomonori Aoyama, Keio University, Japan

Chong Kwon Kim, Seoul National University, Korea

Petri Mahonen, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

Panel 2: Wireless sensor networks: bridging the physical and cyber spaces

Moderator: David Du, National Science Foundation and University of Minnesota

Panelists:

Nagi Rao, Oak Ridge National Lab, USA

John Stankovic, University of Virginia, USA

Ramesh Govindan, University of Southern California, USA

Guru Parulkar, National Science Foundation

Tarek Abdelzaher, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA

Mani Srivastava, UCLA, USA

Panel 3: Vehicular ad hoc networks: reality or lab demo?

Moderator: Douglas M Kavner, Raytheon Company

Panelists:

Dmitri Khijniak, TechnoCom Corporation, USA.

P. R. Kumar, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA

Kenneth P. Laberteaux, Toyota Technical Center, USA

Varsha Sadekar, General Motors R&D Center, USA

PANELS ABSTRACTS

Panel 1: Clean-slate designs for a future Internet

Around the world researchers are endeavoring to meet the demanding challenges of the 21st century by envisioning a clean-slate design for a Future Internet that meets critical needs for the future. For example, the Future Internet should: be secure, preserve privacy and {be} worthy of our societies' trust; enable billions of wireless and mobile network and sensor networks as well as high-performance wired and optical networks; support demanding applications from critical infrastructure management to realtime video and e-science, and be manageable, scalable, and economically viable. Different countries have responded to these challenges by initiating programs to design Future Internets that have characteristics such as these and meet societal and cultural values. This panel introduces four initiatives from different parts of the world.

The US in 2006 initiated its Future Internet Design (FIND) focus area as part of the National Science Foundation's Networking Technology and Systems (NeTS) program. This program challenges the research community to create new network architectures that meet the objectives listed above. Europe has several plans, including EIFFEL a part of the pan-European 7th Framework research program that provides opportunities for collaborative research beginning in 2008. The EIFFEL-group is calling for exploratory and innovative risk-taking research to work towards true disruptive enhancements in a Future Internet through interdisciplinary research that addresses technology, governance, privacy and societal issues. After almost a year of meetings focusing on Future Internet research, Korean researchers were recently granted government research funding to begin work in this area. In addition they are forming a Future Internet Forum. Japan has initiated research on its New Generation Network (NWGN) to be realized in 2015-2020. This follows work by Japan's Telecom carriers and vendors that are now concentrating on the deployment of NGN (Next Generation Network) which is expected to provide triple-play services (voice/video/internet) and quadruple-play (voice/video/internet/wireless) services over IP networks. This international INFOCOM panel will introduce these national projects and discuss the goals, research endeavors, and (where appropriate) potential testbeds on which to deploy newly designed Future Internet architectures. This panel is part of a goal to establish strong international collaboration among national efforts--creating a Future Internet must be an international endeavor.

Panel 2: Wireless sensor networks: bridging the physical and cyber spaces

In the near future, a huge number of sensor networks designed for various purposes will be integrated into Internet. In this panel, we will first overview the state-of-art in sensor networks. What is the progress being made in the last few years? Then we plan to examine the challenges and opportunities ahead of us. Should we focus more on mote type of sensors or special bulky type of sensors? What are the best ways to create societal impacts? How the future Internet to be re-designed to make seamless connections for this enormously large number of sensors (or physical devices)?

Panel 3: Vehicular ad hoc networks: reality or lab demo?

Many countries are preparing for the deployment of large scale vehicular ad hoc networks to the general public due to the potentially dramatic improvements in safety, highway efficiency and driver convenience. The largest such effort is the United States Department of Transportation's Vehicle Infrastructure Integration (VII) program. It aims to deploy IEEE 802.11p based wireless data communications and intelligent processing in vehicles and roadside equipment nationwide, and will provide a network linking the roadside equipment to public transportation agencies and commercial service providers. This panel will explore how close such efforts are to deployment and the unique technical challenges that they still face from congestion control to long-term supportability.

The panel discussion will address how to optimize performance simultaneously in the many domains that these networks are expected to support. Safety requires very low latency, authenticated communications from vehicle to vehicle and roadside to vehicle within a local area.

Highway efficiency applications require anonymous communications with a large number of vehicles. Finally, many driver convenience applications require confidential data sessions to a remote service provider over a long travel distance.