Editorial

Citation

Lopez, D.R. (2008), "Editorial", Campus-Wide Information Systems, Vol. 25 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/cwis.2008.16525eaa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Campus-Wide Information Systems, Volume 25, Issue 5

This special issue presents the latest results in networked campus information services and technologies as presented at the TERENA Networking Conference 2008 in Bruges. These results cover a wide range of aspects and realisations, from initial, research-oriented efforts, to actual deployments. The annual Networking Conference of the Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association offers a unique opportunity for practitioners, developers, planners and users in the research and educational networking community to share and discuss the current and future course of technologies, policies and practices with prominent figures from industry, research and government. Here they build common consensus and collaboration links in Europe and beyond.

“Beyond connectivity”

The theme of TNC 2008 reflects the need to go further in the development of academic networking services. In earlier years, connectivity was the main concern of national research networking organisations: in many cases, a simple successful ‘ping’ was enough to make heads nod in approval. We have gone much further since then: fast, pervasive, mobile, safe and dependable connectivity has become commonplace. Now we are exploring “beyond connectivity”.

The conference programme was structured around seven questions on issues related to digital identity, virtual worlds, security aspects, monitoring and measurement, service models, and future developments – without forgetting the real reasons for academic networks: the needs of our users.

Archives of live-streamed speeches, speakers’ slides and other TNC 2008 information are all available at: http://tnc2008.terena.org

The opening keynote speaker, Paul Van Binst (ULB), gave a thought-provoking talk that encompassed some of the history of research and education networking, as well as some consideration of present and future trends.

With a series of amusing examples to make the point, Professor Van Binst introduced some serious questions about the future of research networks. Do they need to develop more functionality? Should they think about a new business plan? Should they remain separate from other (public) services? If they do, will they die, be superseded by the more rapidly developing commercial sector, or continue alongside as a niche market?

In the spirit of the conference’s theme, Professor Van Binst’s presentation raised more questions than it answered, but he nevertheless succeeded in holding a mirror up to the research networking world and inviting it to consider where it is going.

The following parallel sessions started a track on the most popular (according to the number of papers presented and other activities around the conference) facet in TNC 2008: digital identity. From the basic principles to the leading edge technologies, all aspects of this discipline were analysed and discussed, and I must say that new courses of action were agreed among the interested participants.

The second day plenary talks were specifically dedicated to digital identity. Josh Howlett (JANET(UK)) showed that today’s identity protocols are so numerous and specific to certain layers of the network that there is no connection between them. This places an increased burden on users and network administrators alike and means information cannot flow between the layers, potentially resulting in security problems. Like builders installing foundations to bind different strata of rock and prevent slippage, networkers need to “dig down in the stack” and tap into layers of identity information in order to build a stronger system of trust.

Moving the topic from who can be connected to what can be connected, Steve Hanna of Juniper Networks explained Network Access Control (NAC) and related technologies in his plenary presentation. He discussed approaches to controlling which devices can be connected, under what circumstances, and to fixing “unhealthy” machines. These have converged into one architecture and set of standards, Trusted Network Connect.

Medical images could be seen during the lunch break, with a live demonstration of high definition video conferencing between locations in Belgium, Japan, Singapore and Italy.

The third day of the conference started with complementary plenary talks by Tim Robinson of Net North West and Richard Katz, vice-president of EDUCAUSE.

Both considered social, demographic, political and economic factors that could have an impact on education and, indirectly, research networking. Their audience included participants in Malawi, China, Spain, Italy, Indonesia and the Czech Republic, who were linked by live-stream videoconferencing, as part of the GLOBAL project’s Virtual Conference Centre initiative.

Tim Robinson focused on the ever-increasing pace of technological change and asked whether the research networking community is ready for the rapid changes in governance that will accompany it. He explored the growing consumerism of information technologies and our ability to pay for information.

“Are we building tomorrow’s networks for yesterday’s world, or yesterday’s university?” Richard Katz asked. “How do we avoid doing that?” One suggestion he made after the plenary talks were over was to begin integrating more people from different disciplines, ethnic groups and cultures into the discussion. As the live-streaming in this session showed, the networks themselves can be part of the solution.

The last day of the conference started with a panel on the “successes and shortcomings” of the GN2 project and the GÉANT2 pan-European academic network. In a series of short but challenging presentations, the panelists fired off their thoughts on a range of relevant areas before audience members joined the fray, moderated by IT consultant Robin Arak. Topics with the most impact were those relating to the management and marketing of research and education networks and services.

A live demonstration that followed achieved a ‘first’ in radio astronomy. Members of the EXPReS project linked telescopes in Africa, Europe, North America and South America to a central data correlator in The Netherlands, simulating a telescope almost 11,000 kilometres in diameter. Data were streamed to JIVE, the Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe at a rate of 1.44 Gbps. There, the data were correlated in real-time, and results were transmitted to the demonstration running at the conference showroom.

Huib Jan van Langevelde of JIVE explained the details involved during the TNC’s closing plenary session. He said that such developments in connectivity have put Europe far ahead of other world regions in this field of research and that close collaboration with national research networking organisations and GÉANT must be continued.

Papers selected

Ten out of the 105 articles presented at TNC 2008 were selected by the Programme Committee to be included in this journal issue. They represent outstanding achievements in the areas of interest the conference focused on.

The paper by Belter et al. introduces a network architecture that implements the concept of Grid Network Services. GNS is intended to allow the provisioning of network and Grid resources in a single step, through a set of seamlessly integrated procedures.

The second paper, by Martin et al., describes the methods used to monitor and measure the performance of the data acquisition network deployed in the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN, Geneva. The system is designed to distinguish between real and self inflicted problems, as well as to identify traffic anomalies that may prevent the system from meeting its stringent performance goals.

In the third paper, Friaças et al. present and discuss the evaluation of data collected by several probes deployed in the Portuguese Research and Education Network during 2007, cross-checking results of the monitoring systems, with a special focus on IPv6.

Location-based services are addressed by Zhou in the fourth paper. This introduces the concept of web-based tracking and guiding and discusses the relevant issues regarding location-aware web systems, location determination, location-dependent content query and personalised presentation.

In the fifth paper, Lamotte et al. describe the evolution of the ALVIC architecture for networked virtual environment applications, which provides a complete framework supporting mobile access and deployment of virtual worlds. The paper analyses the application of this environment in two real-life cases.

The sixth paper, by John and Olovsson, studies occurrences of malicious activities in Internet traffic, and analyses highly aggregated backbone data regarding the consistency of network and transport layer headers. The study also discusses in detail the possible causes of inconsistencies and their security implications for networked devices.

Digital identity is illustrated with a working example in the seventh paper, by Castro et al. This describes the identity federation EFDA-Fed, which gathers together EFDA (the European Fusion Development Agreement as an organisation) and a set of fusion research laboratories from five European countries, focusing on new solutions found in the integration process, technical aspects of the federation as system architecture, integration of new services, and new types of client applications used in a distributed research environment.

Identity management is also addressed by the eighth paper, presenting the authentication and authorisation service of perfSONAR, the multi-domain network monitoring infrastructure being deployed in the academic networks of Europe, USA and Brazil. Rodriguez, Molina and Boote present how this service is designed and deployed, and how it is able to process authentication and authorisation requests sent by the perfSONAR components.

The ninth paper, by Huhtanen et al., describes how the eduroam ®[1] roaming network access architecture and technologies can be used in building wireless community networks for regular consumers, and presents the experiences gathered in building the Wireless Tampere community network.

Finally, Wählisch et al. compare internet measurement data obtained from several projects observing the Internet during recent years, and analyse the internet’s evolution, its degree distributions and correlations at IP node level.

I hope that the selected papers in this special issue will help in portraying the impressive quality of the presentations and the high level of discussions at TNC 2008, and contribute to the development of networking technologies and services, both in the academic and research environment, and the society in general.

Note:® eduroam is a registered trademark of TERENA.

Diego R. LopezRedIRIS, Spain