Internet Society Frontpage

Events Membership
About the Internet Standards
Publications  Public Policy
About ISOC Education

Events 

Become an ISOC Member

INET Conferences

The Internet Global Summit - A Net Odyssey - Mobility and the Internet

The 11th Annual Internet Society Conference
5-8 June 2001 - Stockholmsmässan - Stockholm, Sweden
inet2001@ISOC.ORG

Technology Summit

The Technology Summit will be divided into 4 parallel threads, for a total of more than 20 sessions: Two threads are organised "horizontally": one focussing on the Infrastructure Technologies, the other on the Application Technologies. The two other threads are vertically structured and address issues lying at all levels. The first will discuss the Technologies for Mobility. The second is a novelty: for the first time at an INET conference, an entire thread will be dedicated to the IETF (the Internet Engineering Task Force). Five panels will address a selection of the latest developments, and the hottest topics. Examples of sessions that will be offered in these four threads include Wireless Infrastructure, Metadata paradigm for finding information, IPv6 and the wireless world, and content Delivery Networks.

Infrastructure Technologies Thread

Thread Chairs: Scott Bradner, Franck Boissiere

The new millennium is probably opening a new era for the underlying infrastructure of the Internet. Not only is the transmission and switching capacity being multiplied by several orders, but also the IP technology is likely to become a key component of the converged telecommunication core systems. This thread addresses several of the key issues associated with these new challenges such as new approaches for routing, quality or service and network engineering or mastering the mix of wireless and wireline Internet.

Internet Dynamics and IP in 3GPP
This session will include 3 papers on various aspects of measuring the dynamics of the Internet and the effects of the dynamic nature of the Net. In addition there will be one paper about the use of IP protocols in 3rd generation cellular networks.

New Approaches to Internet Routing
This special session focuses on the needs, options and emerging solutions for new approaches to routing in the Internet.

Internet Performance and Quality of Service
This session will explore the full range of Internet performance from the restraints of bandwidth limited networks to very high speed research networks. It will also include descriptions of two approaches to supporting predictable quality of service in challenging environments.

Internet Management
This session will combine a paper about understanding how to measure MPLS-based traffic engineering and the resulting quality of service with a paper describing an innovative way to manage and represent wide area networks.

Aspects of Wireless Networking
This session includes a discussion of the use of the emerging Bluetooth personal area networking standard and a examination of the issues in securing wireless access networks.

Application Technologies Thread

Thread Chairs: Erik Huizer, Patrik Fältström

Regardless of how much money goes into the fixed or wireless infrastructure, it is the applications that make the Net. The developments that are taking place in the field of applications are at the same time going at an incredible speed as well as very slow. The speed is visible in the new versions and plug-ins for browsers that appear almost every day. Slow, in that e-mail is still very much like it was 10 years ago, and in that we still have no universal solution for a secure Internet. All in all there is much to be said about applications and security, and that is what this thread is all about. The thread aims at a very condensed overview of some of the existing developments in a few selected fields. Ranging from Classical e-mail and security to trendy applications like Video and Location aware applications.

Go get it! Metadata helps in finding information
With the growth of the Internet and the amount of information on the Net, finding information through simple mammoth centralized search engines that index static information is showing its limitations. More and more of the information is not in textual format but in graphics, video or audio format, or in databases or digital object repositories, so current indexing approaches don't work. Instead, we need to attach metadata to objects and their identifiers, and to have ways of gathering this metadata to support information discovery applications. This session will survey the status of a range of work in these areas.

Where am I and who's with me?
Location dependent services increase in popularity when consumers start to be able to access the Internet from more than one location, and even from devices that move, like cellular phones. Some traditional web-based services today ask the user to enter the location of the user which accesses the service. Why isn´t that information entered automatically? How do we merge the need for geographic information being sent to s e r v i c e s while keeping a strong view on privacy and integrity issues? This session will discuss the benefits and downsides with g e o g r a p h i c information being part of services on the Internet.

Now playing on your home network! Video distribution over the Internet
Distributing video over the Internet is the most quoted killer app for broadband Internet infrastructures. However video distribution requires careful engineering. Careful network design and clever distribution are needed to minimize delay and jitter. Intelligent compression algorithms are needed to generate quality video over not-so-broadband local loops. This session explores these issues in depth.

On-line Gaming
Lately we have seen a number of new ideas being discussed: peer 2 peer communication, bandwidth and delay constraints, community building, presence information services, localization. For the game community these issues are not new, but instead all are needed in various degrees for an online game. This session will describe how an online game uses the Internet, and why some of the issues listed above are more important than others.

Safe surfing. Security issues
Security has been an issue on the Internet since its conception in the early seventies. There is still no single security "solution" and the danger seems to increase. This session presents some new developments in various security areas.

Instant, reliable, unified, secure, wireless, volume, multi-media messaging
Internet mail has been in operation for more than 25 years and has scaled nearly 100,000 orders of magnitude with no major changes to its basic architecture. The demands of global commerce are forcing a wide range of enhancements to be pursued. Should major changes begin with a new technology base, or can existing Internet mail continue to evolve and incorporate requirements for quality of service (such as "instant" delivery), voice/fax/ mail integration, legal security, multi-million recipient volumes, and more? This session will explore these demands and the activities underway to satisfy them. Some of the news is excellent. Some is not.

Mobility Technologies Thread

Thread Chairs: Gabriel Montenegro, Steinar Dalin

This thread attempts to look at the mobility landscape. It being a sparse landscape, we will be somewhat limited. Five sessions explore in different styles and in different themes. We will have futuristic visions, and looks at themes like IPv6 and optimization mechanisms. We will shift our attention from the core of the network to the devices and how to serve content to them, finalizing with a session on operator perspectives. The focus is on wide-area uses of wireless technologies, such as we see in 2.5G and 3G, although, in conjunction with these, local area wireless will also be discussed.

Mobility: Setting the scene and Outrageous opinions panel
We invite one of the original thinkers in computer science to share with us his vision of what the implications with respect to service architectures may be in this new wireless world. This session finishes with a very interesting and controversial panel which questions the need for wireless research.

IPv6 and the wireless world
Mobile IP has received tremendous attention from the cellular telephony industry for use in the next generation networks. These papers explore remaining issues and scenarios in its deployment, with particular attention to IPv6.

Tweaking the Networks
The use of IP technologies in cellular networks requires judicious application of different optimizations. Here are some thoughts on how to better adopt IP technologies

Serving Mobile devices
Supporting mobile devices over IP networks requires careful consideration in terms of content adaptation, privacy and security formats, and, in general, in terms of what the 'wireless internet' is.

Operator Perspective
The operators have the daunting task of deploying cellular technologies that use IP technology. This session discusses operational considerations and experiences

IETF Thread

Thread Chair: Fred Baker
Five panel discussions are presented to discuss key work ongoing in the IETF. Intended to inform both lay and technical audiences, these discussions will set forth new service models being used in the Internet and key considerations for its users

Content Delivery Networks
Content Delivery Networks are networks which improve perceived internet performance by storing or caching data close to the people who use it. Far beyond simple web and streaming media caching hierarchies, though, these systems map IP Address to nations, service providers, and data centers. They seek to optimize access as a corporate or service provider offering or as an offering overlaid on a set of service providers. This panel will discuss work ongoing in the IETF to standardize architectures and protocols, with a view to enabling network managers to make safer and better understood design and purchasing decisions on this volatile technology.

Law Enforcement, Privacy, and the Internet
Increasingly, the Internet is found to under-grid the gross domestic product of nations, and to be viewed as a critical communications infrastructure. It is also being used by common people in their daily life, and by criminals in their activities. As such, nations have found it necessary to apply legal doctrines for the support of law enforcement, including wiretap and document access, in a realm in which people are typically unguarded and frequently regard their communications as private. This session will review recent legal steps, such as the application of the UK's RIP and US CALEA legislation to the Internet, and requirements by various countries that service providers in them provide specialized access to law enforcement. It will discuss the legal, philosophical, and societal impacts of this technology, and the reasonable concerns of citizens and governments.

Virtual Private Networks
"Virtual Private Networks" is a buzz word used to describe a variety of network types. They have a common surface objective: to provision a network, whether provided by a single service provider or multiple providers, to provide what to a customer appears to be a private network. Current approaches include the use of IPSEC as a tunneling mechanism, other tunnel mechanisms such as L2TP and GRE, MPLS paths with BGP information distribution, and more traditional circuit switch architectures. This panel will discuss the definition work being done in the IETF. The IETF is looking at the requirements individual VPN approaches must satisfy from a Service Provider (SP) perspective. Particular attention will be placed on SP requirements for security, privacy, scalability and manageability considering such factors as Service Provider's projections for number, complexity, and rate of change of customer VPNs over the next several years.

International Domain Names
The Internet has grown to encompass a network of communities representing a global mosaic of languages and cultures. The increasing volume of modern business, research and interpersonal communications in non-English languages is a testament to this fact; clearly, ASCII-based domain names have become an anachronism in a multilingual Internet world. However, internationalizing the Domain Name System is no small task, and the consequences of hasty actions are serious. In response, the IETF has formed the Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) Working Group to ensure the preservation of the universal nature of the Internet while bringing friendlier multilingual domain names. This panel will discuss the technology, the IETF work, and the deployment issues, impacts on applications and the current market.

New Interconnection Architectures
The IETF has clear direction from the IESG to define control plane protocols for optical networks; in fact, it has created several new Working Groups to address "sub-IP" technologies. This session will cover some of these WGs (in particular, IPO, IPORPR, MPLS and CCAMP), their charters, and the progress that each has made.