The Third International Network Conference (INC 2002)

Citation

Furnell, S. (2003), "The Third International Network Conference (INC 2002)", Internet Research, Vol. 13 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/intr.2003.17213baa.002

The Third International Network Conference (INC 2002)

The Third International Network Conference (INC 2002)

The papers in this issue of Internet Research are based on a selection of submissions from INC 2002, the Third International Network Conference, which was held in Plymouth, UK, from 16-18 July 2002. INC events aim to provide a forum for sharing the latest research in computer networks and related technologies, and regular readers of the journal may recall that papers from previous conferences were published in Internet Research Vol. 9 No. 1 and Vol. 11 No. 1.

In common with previous events, INC 2002 was staged at the University of Plymouth, with co-sponsorship from the British Computer Society, the Institute of Electrical Engineers, Orange Personal Communications Services, and Emerald (the publishers of Internet Research). The main themes addressed by the 2002 conference were:

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  Web technologies and applications.

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  Network technologies.

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  Multimedia over IP.

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  Quality of service.

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  Security and privacy.

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  Distributed technologies.

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  Mobility.

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  Applications and impacts.

Continuing the success of previous INC events, the conference drew a truly international audience, with authors from 23 countries. These included a diverse mixture of academic and industrial participants, ensuring that a number of different perspectives were represented in both the presentations and the subsequent discussions. The full conference proceedings include a total of 72 papers, with coverage ranging from discussion of applications and services, down to details of specific underlying technologies[1].

The papers selected for this issue of Internet Research have been chosen to be representative of the broad range of topics covered by the conference, while at the same time addressing topics of relevance to the journal readership.

Several of the papers address the ever-important issue of security. Prevelakis and Keromytis propose the use of a special purpose drop-in firewall/VPN gateway, which can be inserted between a mobile workstation and the network in order to provide individualised security services for that particular station. Their paper, which was the recipient of the conference Best Paper Prize (sponsored by Emerald and Internet Research), discusses the features and advantages of the system, and demonstrates how it was used in various application areas. Staying with the security theme, the paper from Horn et al., considers security within emerging mobile networks, and surveys the security architecture of the IP multimedia core network subsystem of UMTS (the European standard for third generation mobile networks). The third security paper, from Wei-qiang Sun et al., discusses the security problems with current multicast protocols, and proposes a stateful multicast access control mechanism that aims to make the multicast delivery infrastructure more secure and reliable. Moving to a more application level focus, Yau et al., consider security in the context of Internet-based education, and propose a copyright protection mechanism to protect online learning materials from unauthorised dissemination. Their paper discusses how this mechanism can be integrated in the operational model of online learning providers.

Another strong theme emerging from the papers that have been selected is that of enhancements to the communications mechanisms of the Internet. In a paper that was one of the runners-up for the best paper prize, Stuer et al., present the design and implementation of a Java-based Reliable MultiPeer Protocol (RMPP), for use in distributed virtual environments. The paper considers a number of aspects of its design and development, as well as some applications of the resulting protocol. Mannaert et al., describe a Web portal for multicast communication management, which provides fully automatic service management with integrated provisioning of hardware equipment. Miladinovic and Stadler present an extension of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to support closed multiparty conferences, adding extensions to the protocol to provide functionality for discovering the identity of other participants in a conference. The practical impacts of the extension, in terms of additional signalling traffic, are then considered.

Of course, none of these technologies would be of any benefit if we could not address the Internet systems in the first place, and the limited address space of IPv4 is an established problem. To this end, the paper by Bouras et al., describes some of the main transition mechanisms that can be deployed in order to facilitate the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 (considering their usability, usefulness and manageability), and discusses the authors' own experiences in the context of the Greek Research & Technology Network (GRNET).

The papers in this issue have been extended from the versions that originally appeared in the conference proceedings. This has given the authors the opportunity to provide greater detail, as well as, in some cases, to update the content to reflect feedback received during the conference and any more recent developments in their research.

Following the success of the 2002 conference, an INC 2004 event has been scheduled for July next year. Readers interested in attending, or submitting a paper, are asked to look at www.inc2004.org for further details.

Steven FurnellGuest Editor

Note1. Full copies of the conference proceedings can be obtained from the Short Course Unit at the University of Plymouth, UK (scunit@plymouth.ac.uk)

Thanks are due to Paul Dowland, Jayne Garcia, Denise Horne, Benn Lines and the various researchers from the Network Research Group without whose support and involvement the conference would not have taken place. Acknowledgements are also due to the numerous members of the International Programme Committee who assisted with the original review process. Finally, particular thanks must be given to David Schwartz, Editor of Internet Research and a valued member of the INC programme committee, for his continued support of the conference and for again offering the opportunity for us to compile this special issue.