This project covers travel and lodging support for graduate students to attend the workshop on Future Internet Architectures. The Future Internet Workshop (FIW) is focused on presentations from students on their new work on questions of Future Internet Architecture, providing an opportunity for students to interact with both other students and with senior people from the telecommunications industry (e.g., Cisco, Deutsche Telekom, Comcast, etc.). The workshop to be held on June 9th and 10th at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA hosts 22 students.
INTELLECTUAL MERIT: Twelve of the students attending are presenting talks exploring various technical approaches to architecture of a future internet, including faulttolerance, malware detection, new forms of multicast, and new approaches to debugging distributed software systems.
BROADER IMPACT: The Internet has impacts far beyond the technologies, and the values inherent in the design of a Future Internet will strongly affect the uses and applications of that Internet. An example would be healthcare data, a kind of information that many people are uncomfortable putting on the Internet today, and may be even less comfortable with in a cloud-based future Internet. Approaches to security and availability and other technical issues must be consistent with societal, governing and economic issues. The workshop has technology leaders from the Internet service providers as invited speakers and provides students (a population from which future technology leaders will be drawn) with an opportunity to hear these speakers and interact with them to understand issues beyond the technology.
The purpose of the effort was to provide support for a Future Internet Workshop at the University of Pennsylvania in the form of student travel funds. The goal of the workshop, held June 9-10, 2011, was to discuss challenges and promising approaches to future Internets. Many, although not all, of the attendees were involved with the NSF-supported NEBULA Future Internet Architecture. Invited speakers from the technology industry (Internet Service Providers and network equipment vendors) spoke on challenges and then students spoke on their approaches to problems. Amongst the interesting challenges raised were the challenge of building a scalable "routing complex" rather than a collection of routers, and the challenge of running a major ISP as a cloud-like orchestration of network elements. There was a particular focus on the emerging computing cloud, and its inherent reliability and security challenges. The participating students were exposed to a reviewing process orchestrated by a program committee for the workshop, consisting of five senior networking researchers, with papers reviewed and commented on by at least three referees. This provided students experience in interacting with their scientific community. A proceedings document containing a description of the workshop and papers has been prepared and is available via e-mail request from the PI.
