E-NEXT WG3 Questionnaire with Collected Answers

Status: 27. 5. 2004

Edited by Thomas Plagemann

Which CN related projects are you working on or you have recently finished? (Please give short description, project URL, and name and e-mail of contact person if possible)

- IST Videogateway a couple of years ago (http://www.optibase.com/videogateway/). It included research on multimedia streaming/playout adaptation. [Nikos Laoutaris]

- My PhD topic was "Application Networks", that are defined as edge-networks that provide application services. Where an example of an edge-network is Akamai. And application services are generic applications. My PhD thesis is at http://people.ac.upc.es/oardaiz/Thesis My name is Oscar Ardaiz, oardaiz@ac.upc.es [Oscar Ardaiz]

- I'm working on caching in the INSTANCE II project. Basically, this involves investigating a cache replacement scheme suitable for mixed media in a news on demand scenario. Official project homepage: http://www.ifi.uio.no/~instance. Email of all participants is listed on that page. [Frank Johnsen]

- Beside E-Next, I'm working on two different European projects. One is PEPITO and the other one is EVERGROW.
PEPITO 2002-2004 stands for Peer-to-Peer Computing Implementation and Theory. Within the PEPITO project we study and address problems related to peer-to-peer algorithms, middleware, and applications. We investigate completely decentralized models of user-centric peer-to-peer computing. url: http://www.sics.se/pepito contact: Seif Haridi <seif@it.kth.se>
EVERGROW 2004-... ever-growing global scale-free networks, their provisioning, repair and unique functions -- is to invent methods and systems, and build infrastructure for measurement, mock-up and analysis of network traffic, topology and logical structure, so that we can start addressing the opportunities presented by the Internet of 2025. url: http://www.evergrow.org contact: Erik Aurell <eaurell@sics.se> [Valentin Mesaros]

- Industry Project with PANASONIC concerning the distribution of content over wireless networks. The project partner does not want too much publicity. Therefore there is no Web-Site [Andreas Mauthe]

- I'm working on overlay networks, as a part of the INSTANCE II project. The focus of my work is adding QoS-awareness to an overlay network through building a QoS-aware reconfiguration mechanism. The project homepages can be found at http://www.ifi.uio.no/~instance, and contains contact information for all project memebers. [Trude Hafsøe]

- Krakow Centre for Telemedicine and Preventive Medicine, http://www.telemedycyna.krakow.pl/, Krzysztof Zieliński, mailto:kz@ics.agh.edu.pl
PRO-ACCESS, http://www.pro-access.org/, Krzysztof Zieliński, mailto:kz@ics.agh.edu.pl
The ImPROving ACCESS of Associated States To Advanced Concepts In Medical Informatics (PRO-ACCESS) project focuses on creating a platform for promotion, dissemination and transfer of advanced health telematics concepts and experiences from development and deployment of telemedicine solutions to NAS. To achieve this, a Centre of Competence will be established to broaden the formula of the Krakow Telemedicine CoE existing in Poland, in order to coordinate publishing activities, events, trainings and intake of solutions from cooperating partners within EU and NAS. The main impact of the Centre will be a substantially improved awareness of state-of- the-art medical telematics technologies in NAS. The Krakow Telemedicine CoE will be thereby strengthened by increasing its networking with leading RTD centres in EU and NAS, and by training of research and professional staff of the Centre and target user groups of e-health solutions developed in the CoE. [Mikolaj Leszczuk]

- 1/ We work within the Muse integrated project on the definition of congestion control mechanisms for large scale virtual environments over heterogeneous networks. Muse project URL: http://www.ist-muse.org/. Within this project we integrate the adaptation mechanisms to the V-Eye application. http://www.inria.fr/planete/software/V-Eye.
2/ We are currently working with Alcatel on the selection of the best server among a set of
replicated servers over the Internet. We are defining a new metric for the selection of the best server. The next step will be the integration of this metric in a P2P framework in order to choose the closest peers and the best route among peers. [Walid Dabbous et al.]

- The Network Systems Group (http://www.ee.upatras.gr/netsys/), lead by Prof. Serpanos (serpanos@ee.upatras.gr) does not currently work on a funded research project on CN. A local activity has been initiated on P2P CN, with emphasis on network characteristics of these systems. Specifically, we are working towards addressing the problems of efficient bandwidth management for P2P systems by exploiting object reference locality through cache/proxy systems, security and privacy issues on P2P systems, and topological characterization of P2P networks towards organization of P2P CN that map to Internet topology. [Nikolaos Xipolias]

- Audio-conferencing over Application-Level Multicast Cheating nodes in Application-Level Multicast. n.blundell@comp.lancs.ac.uk [Nick Blundell]

- In the field of the Content Networks our group in UPM has taken part in this recent or present research projects:
"ELENA Creating a Smart Space For Learning" http://www.elena-project.org/ IST Project is to demonstrate the feasibility of smart spaces for learning. Smart learning spaces are defined as educational service mediators, which allow the consumption of heterogeneous learning services via assessment tools, learning management systems, educational (meta) repositories and live delivery systems such as video conferencing systems. ELENA will set up an operational learning services network based on an interoperable communication infrastructure between heterogeneous peers and devices. This new smart learning space is most beneficial for learners since it opens a much wider spectrum of learning possibilities. For the future creation of such smart learning spaces best practice guidelines will be released.
"EducaNext" <http://www.educanext.org/ubp> is a service supporting the creation and sharing of knowledge for Higher Education. It is open to any member of the academic or research community. EducaNext fosters collaboration among educators and researchers
"UNIVERSAL Exchange for Pan-European Higher Education" IST research project The project UNIVERSAL is an attempt to demonstrate an open exchange of learning resources (LRs) between higher education institutions (HEIs) across Europe. The business-to-business oriented brokerage will embrace offers, enquiries, booking and delivery of Learning Resources. UNIVERSAL will enable • a single faculty to enrich a specific course with external material, • an existing alliance of universities (also called cluster in UNIVERSAL papers) to make their exchange more efficient and richer in content.
"Euro6IX" is the larger research project up to now funded by the European IST Program (IST-2001-32161). The goal of the Euro6IX project is to support the rapid introduction of IPv6 in Europe. The deployment of the Isabel application and the XLIM toolkit are included in the scope of interest of this project. [Diego A. A. Ortiz et al.]

- Application-level multicast: TBCP protocol (http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/users/laurent/papers/abstracts/tbcp.html)
Bandwidth management of ALM trees for content distribution
(http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/users/laurent/papers/abstracts/proms01-1.html)
Cheating in application-level multicast
(http://www.inrialpes.fr/planete/people/roca/doc/infocom04_alm_cheats.pdf)
Autonomic Content Distribution Infrastructure (due to start on Oct 1)
(http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/research/mpg/projects/e-next/e-next.html#mozTocId502251)

- ENTHRONE project (http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/research/mpg/projects/e-next/e-next.html#mozTocId614422) [Laurent Mathy]

- Content Creation (Teachware)
- Recording of graduate-level courses (Computer Networks and Multimedia Technology), published in the WWW (in English)
http://www.informatik.uni-mannheim.de/informatik/pi4/stud/veranstaltungen/
Christian Liebig (liebig@informatik.uni-mannheim.de)
- Java animations that visualize algorithms in the area of computer networks and multimedia technology http://herodot.informatik.uni-mannheim.de/appverw/appletlist2.php
Christian Liebig (liebig@informatik.uni-mannheim.de)
- Content Delivery
Application-level multicast routing in the Internet for interactive real-time applications
http://www.informatik.uni-mannheim.de/~jvogel/
Juergen Vogel (vogel@informatik.uni-mannheim.de)
- Multicast routing in wireless ad hoc networks
http://www.informatik.uni-mannheim.de/informatik/pi4/projects/pbm/
Matthias Transier (transier@informatik.uni-mannheim.de) [Jürgen Vogel]

- BIDS (Broadband Infrastructures for Digital TV & Multimedia Services), BBL (Boadbandloop), BTI (Broadband Trial Integration) short descriptions of the projects can be found at URL: http://www.kt.agh.edu.pl/en/research/prez/
two other projects started a couple of weeks ago:
Development of models for creation of multimedia services on digital TV platform;
Functional analysis of the peer-to-peer technology and its usefulness for multimedia applications [Zbigniew Hulicki]

- I am working on my Ph.D thesis work, entitled Swarm. A CN designed to provide a scalable content distribution infrastructure in a heterogeneous environment. Specifically it is designed to cope with mobile devices and wireless access networks, which introduce a large variety of degrading properties into a content delivery system. [Denney & Race]

- I worked on an european project called CatNet (http://research.ac.upc.es/catnet/), it was about evaluating a decentralized economic control and coordination mechanism, the Catallaxy paradigm, for the decentralized control of dynamic application layer networks.
And now i'm working on "Grid and Peer-to-Peer Middleware for Cooperative Learning Environments" (http://research.ac.upc.es/crac/) where some of the objectives are on the definition of a middleware to allow such collaboration and managing the resources in an autonomous and decentralized way.
So mostly my research is about overlay networks, peer-to-peer, etc [Pau Artigaz]

- INCO – COPERNICUS “Knowledge Shared XPS-Based Research Network Using Multi-Agent- Systems”: KNIXMAS (project N 977113), 1998-2001
http://www.knixmas.de/
In that project I was responsible for preparing two software elements: a network service (search for information on the M.A. base, XML oriented data transfer); cohesion support for several twin databases; [Tomasz Orzechowski]

Which CN related master theses and PhD theses have recently been finished or are currently performed at your Institution?
(Please provide title, name of student, and e-mail of student resp. URL of the electronic version of the thesis)

- Expecting Ph.D. graduation in the next 6 month. My subject is the optimization and modeling of content networks. Some publications are available from my homepage at www.cnl.di.uoa.gr/~laoutaris/laoutaris.html. I don't have an abstract currently but will provide one soon. [Nikos Laoutaris]

- "Consistent caching of interactive multimedia scenes" work in progress (soon finished): Simen Rekkedal / simenre@ifi.uio.no
"Prefetching of mixed media in a content distribution network" work in progress (just started): Espen Nilsen / espenni@ifi.uio.no. None of these are electronically published at the moment. [Frank Johnsen]

- PhD under progress: "Peer-to-Peer Systems for Collaborative Applications", Valentin Mesaros <valentin@info.ucl.ac.be>, responsible Peter Van Roy <pvr@info.ucl.ac.be> [Valentin Mesaros]

- Michael Zink: Scalable Internet Video-on-Demand Systems
Giwon On: Quality of Availability for widely Distributed & Replicated Content Stores. PhD is examined in June [Andreas Mauthe]

- Working title of PhD work: “Reconfigurable overlays for QoS aware CDNs”
"Monitoring for CDN overlay Networks" (working title) This is a recently started master thesis by: Erling Ringen Elvsrud <erlingre@ifi.uio.no> [Trude Hafsøe]

- "Implementation of the recognition engine�s search module IN multimedia applicationS", Mikołaj Leszczuk, leszczuk@agh.edu.pl, http://www.kt.agh.edu.pl/~miklesz/thesis.htm [Mikolaj Leszczuk]

- 1/ Ayman El-Sayed,
"Application-Level Multicast Transmission Techniques over the Internet", PhD Thesis, Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble, March, 2004.
http://www.inrialpes.fr/planete/people/elsayed/phd/phd_final_080304.pdf
2/ PhD student: Vijay Arya (Vijay.Arya@sophia.inria.fr) Although Vijay's original PhD topic is on optimization of video transmission on hybrid wired/wireless networks, part of his contribution concerns P2P multicast. Work in progress.
3/ Mohammad Malli is working on the server selection problem, he just started his PhD.
Email: Mohammad.Malli@sophia.inria.fr
4/ engineer internship: Danila Koudriashov (Danila.Koudriashov@sophia.inria.fr)
This internship is related on P2P multicast for multimedia applications
5/ Master internship: Abdramane Diallo (Abdramane.Diallo@sophia.inria.fr)
This internship concerns congestion control for Source Specific Multicast and P2P multicast
environments. [Walid Dabbous et al.]

- Four Ph.D. students of the Network Systems Group are involved in P2P CN activity. Two of them are expected to complete Ph.D. thesis on this area (Mr. Nikolaos Xipolias, xipolias@ee.upatras.gr and Mr. Alexandros Antopoulos, antonopa@ee.upatras.gr) and one of them is working on P2P security issues (Mr. Kiriakos Stefanidis, stefanid@ee.upatras.gr). The exact titles of the theses are not yet decided. Also, it is expected that two M.Sc. students will work from the next (fall) semester on CN topics towards their theses. [Nikolaos Xipolias]

- Ongoing PhD thesis by Karl-Andre Skevik; "Scalability and fault tolerance in content distribution networks", University of Oslo, DMMS group [Karl-Andre Skevik]

- Ongoing master theses at UPM:
- Diego A. Acosta <acosta@dit.upm.es> Overlay networks and GRID technologies applied to virtual desktop computing
- Sandra Aguirre <saguirre@dit.upm.es> Interoperability in e-learning and content repositories of educational resources
- Jose Garcia Monroy <jmonroy@dit.upm.es> Collaboration Grids
- Eduardo Moro Carrizosa <emoro@dit.upm.es> Overlay networks for the deployment of Isabel platforms
- Héctor Ossandon <ossandon@dit.upm.es> Study and proposal of a new CDN architecture [Diego A. A. Ortiz et al.]

- Audio-conferencing over application-level multicast overlays, Nick Blundell, n.blundell@comp.lancs.ac.uk. In progress [Laurent Mathy]

- Thomas Butter, Master's Thesis Contention-Based Multicast Forwarding for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks
Martin Arnold, Master's Thesis Application-Level Multicast-Routing unter Beruecksichtigung von Anwendungspriortaeten (in German)
Juergen Vogel (vogel@informatik.uni-mannheim.de), PhD Thesis, Consistency Algorithms and Protocols for Distributed Interactive Applications [Jürgen Vogel]

- Feasibility of the interactive services on DVB platform, Piotr Gabryś, master theses (in Polish) [Zbigniew Hulicki]

- 1- Title: Scalable content distribution, Date of defense: Apprx. nov. 2004, Candidate: A. Al Hamra, e-mail: alhamra@eurecom.fr, URL: http://www.eurecom.fr/~alhamra/publications.html
2- Title: Hierarchical P2P approach with application to multicast, Date of defense: approx. jan 2005, Candidate: Luis Garcés-Erice, e-mail: luis.garces@eurecom.fr, URL: http://www.eurecom.fr/~garces/ [Guillaume Urvoy-Keller]

- I investigate following:
- market rules in telecommunication networks on the basis of Mobile Agents Technology;
- QoS organized by MAs
- measurement methods done by MAs [Tomasz Orzechowski]

Which tools are you using or planning to use in your CN research?
(Please provide a short description and if possible URL)

- I have used Matlab and Mathematica for CN related simulations. I have also used the ProWGen workload generator (http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~carey/software.htm) and will probably use the Brite topology generator (http://www.cs.bu.edu/brite/). Would also be interested to test future protocols/mechanisms in PlanetLab. [Nikos Laoutaris]

- We are now embarking in using Grid Software (Globus Toolkit) as the programmable infratrustructure for Application Networks. [Oscar Ardaiz]

- So far simulators written in C++, and the lagged fibonacci random generator from the boost library have been used. In the future the Omnet discrete event simulation library will probably also be used. [Frank Johnsen]

- The Mozart Programming System http://www.mozart-oz.org . Mozart is an advanced development platform for intelligent, distributed applications. The system is the result of a decade of research in programming language design and implementation, constraint-based inference, distributed computing, and human-computer interfaces.
P2PS - Peer-to-Peer System library http://www.mozart-oz.org/mogul/info/cetic_ucl/p2ps.html . The P2PS library offers overlay communication primitives and services for P2P applications dealing with highly dynamic network topologies, and scalable with respect to the number of nodes in the system. Although independent of the underlying peer-to-peer technology, P2PS currently only supports Tango. Tango is a peer-to-peer network organization, that we developed, to better structure relative exponential networks to increase their scalability. [Valentin Mesaros]

- There are a number of Tools (e.g. KOMSys, KOMRSVP) that can be found under http://www.KOM.tu-darmstadt.de/Research/MM_DistNet/mm_distnet.html#Software [Andreas Mauthe]

- So far I have only used a self-written data analysis program, written in C++. Current plans includes the usage of the Boost Graph Library for analysis of network graphs, in order to study to which extent it is possible to find alternative, better routes in an overlay network. Information about the Boost Graph library can be found at http://www.boost.org [Trude Hafsøe]

- Helix DNA Producer Command Line Application, https://producerapps.helixcommunity.org/cmdproducer/. The Helix DNA Producer is the multi-format media-encoding engine for creating streaming broadcasts, on-demand streaming content, and downloadable audio video files. Helix DNA Producer, along with the Helix DNA Server and Helix DNA Client, provide end-to-end technology for multi-media creation, delivery, and playback over the Internet.
- Helix DNA Server, https://helix-server.helixcommunity.org/. The Helix DNA Server is a universal delivery engine supporting the real time packetization and network transmission of any media type to any device. The Helix DNA Server is the industry�s core media delivery engine and should be at the center of any digital media system you build.
RealOne Player, http://www.real.com/. It's a player, jukebox, and media browser all-in-one.
PHP, http://www.php.net/. PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.
Perl, http://www.perl.com/. Practical Extraction and Report Language. Other [Mikolaj Leszczuk]

- We use simulators such as ns, and machines from Planetlab. We are currently doing experimentations using standard tools as cprobe, pathload and pchar. We also use : cvs, gmake, gcc/g++, perl, gdb, valgrind, insure(tm), VS.net [Walid Dabbous et al.]

- In the early stages of the research, simulators, such as “ns” and “CSIM” (C/C++ libraries for event driven simulations), are used. Later on, open source software will be developed to collect and analyze traces of P2P systems for further analysis, based on popular networking libraries and open source implementations of P2P clients and servers, as long as a prototype cache/proxy server for P2P CN systems. Further, it is expected that the PlanetLab (http://www.planet-lab.org) platform will be utilized in end of 2004 for performing large scale experiments in an Internet-scale platform. Visualization software, such as the “graphviz” package will be used for exploring topological organization of P2P CN systems and respective Internet topology. [Nikolaos Xipolias]

- MediSyn; a synthetic streaming media service workload generator <URL:http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/iii/projects/medisyn.html> [Karl-Andre Skevik]

- NS-2 -- network simulator [Nick Blundell]

- We are studing the features of XBONE tool (http://www.isi.edu/xbone/) [Diego A. A. Ortiz et al.]

- NS-2, PlanetLab, ALO toolkit (under development) [Laurent Mathy]

- Content Creation: MS Powerpoint, Camtasia (www.camtasia.com), DivX Encoder
Content Delivery: Simulation studies with ns-2 and self-implemented tools [Jürgen Vogel]

- The system is currently using the new Windows XP P2P toolkit. The toolkit provides a distributed name resolution protocol, allowing 'English peer names to be resolved to an endpoint for communication (distributed DNS). A graphing API that allows a subset of nodes to connect and flood data to one another. And a grouping API, layered above the graph it provides group services, such as authentication and credentials. http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/deploy/p2pintro.mspx [Denney & Race]

- I have used, i'm using or i'm planning to use the next tools, although i'm not experienced in any of them:
- j-sim (www.j-sim.org): j-sim, called javasim before, is network simulator like NS (network simulator) but written in java.
- spread (www.spread.org): spread is a distributed group messaging service
- jxta (www.jxta.org): jxta is a peer-to-peer platform for developing applications.
- planet-lab (www.planet-lab.org): it is "an open, globally distributed platform for developing, deploying and accessing planetary-scale network services", basically is a set of distributed linux machines across the world where you have access and you can test your distributed applications. [Pau Artigaz]

- Matlab for analytical and numerical investigations
King for latency measurements in the Internet, (http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/gummadi/king/)
Ad hoc simulators for large scale simulations of p2p networks ( see P. Felber and E.W. Biersack. Self-scaling Networks for Content Distribution. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Self-* Properties in Complex Information Systems (Self-*), Bertinoro, Italy, May-June 2004.) [Guillaume Urvoy-Keller]

- - simulators such as: Jim, and ns-2;
- mobile agent tools for that simulators;
- java environment, [Tomasz Orzechowski]

Which CN application(s) are you developing or you are using? If you do not work with a particular application you probably have a good understanding of a typical application for your solutions.
(Please provide a short description of the application, including content type, encoding, typical users, possible user interactions, user behavior, user requirements, workload generated by the application and if possible a URL to more information)

- I have not developed an application but have studied caching (distributed/hierarchical) and CDN/P2P applications. [Nikos Laoutaris]

- Our solution intends to be a generic infrastructure for any application that can be overlaid. [Oscar Ardaiz]

- The application is news on demand utilizing mixed media. Mixed media is content such as text, video, pictures, etc. grouped together by meta data into a presentation plan. Encoding of media objects can be any format (jpeg, mpeg-4, etc), and the meta data can be any format (smil, mheg, etc). At the moment we're running simulations, and so have not chosen any spesific formats. User interaction/behaviour/workload is not well defined for news on demand since little research has been performed in this area. A student is currently trying to get hold of such statistics from news providers in Norway. [Frank Johnsen]

- Lately, we have been developing two applications demonstrating the functionality of our P2PS system. PostIt http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~valentin/postit/ReadMe.html is a graphical application where users share a virtual board for publishing so called, postits; i.e., short time live texts. A postit message is associated with an absolute expiration time. There is only one logical board shared between users which is replicated to every of them, and they are organized as a P2P overlay network.
Matisse-P2P http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/people/ned/matisse is based on a stand-alone application, called Matisse. The original Matisse is a drawing tool that intends to promote the drawing creativity of young children and enable them to feel confident with their own creations. Matisse-P2P is an application that can run either on a desktop PC or on= an hand-held computing device. The peer-to-peer platform will enable to shift computing efforts through the existing nodes of the platform – if need be -- in order to guarantee anywhere, anytime access to the Matisse-P2P application. [Valentin Mesaros]

- Distributed Content Management Systems for Professional Use (i.e. Broadcaster, Productions Houses, etc.) [Andreas Mauthe]

- The application scenario for my work is a CDN for News-on-Demand, in the form of mixed media. Mixed media consists of various kinds of media objects structured by meta data. This meta data is gathered in a presentation plan. A CDN for this kind of data will generate network traffic with different needs; high-throughput links for streaming data, low latency links for control messages etc. [Trude Hafsøe]

- Medical Digital Video Library. Development of medical digital video library with recordings of invasive procedures incorporating additional information and commentary may improve the efficiency of the training process in interventional domain of medicine. Digital video library enabling access to videos of interventional procedures performed in the range of thoracic medicine may be valuable element of developing practical skills. The library was filled with the video resources recorded in Department of Interventional Pulmonology, enhances training options for pulmonologists and thoracic surgeons. The main focus was put on demonstration of bronchofiberoscopic and videothoracoscopic procedures. The opportunity to browse video recordings of procedures performed in the specific field enhances also considerably the options for training in other medical specialities. In the era of growing health consumers awareness, patients are also perceived as the target audience for medical digital libraries.
Digitized recordings are stored on hard disk to be described by library administrator. The first information consists of dimensions and duration, which is extracted automatically and added to database. The second step is creating human description such as title, author, keywords and other medical specific explanations by leading doctors for final presentation. Next they processes such prepared films.
The leaders create the most interesting scenes, by specifying theirs beginnings and finishes with additional information similar to the film. The scenes can be viewed separately or can be joined in the sequences with their own description.
Each material prepared for viewing, has some description fields, such as title, author and others medical specific. Each of them can serve as a key for search. The end user can have access to materials prepared earlier using any user interface. The most popular, and the easiest way to realize it, is the WWW browser. This eliminates necessity of installing any software on end user computer having operating system with plug-in-enabled browser. [Mikolaj Leszczuk]

- 1/ We are developing the V-Eye (http://www-sop.inria.fr/planete/software/V-Eye/)
large scale virtual environment that has first been developed for ASM-based
multicast environment. A new version of V-eye is supporting SSM multicast
(almost finished). We are interested in supporting environments no IP
multicast service at all is supported, so overlay multicast/P2P multicast
(future works).
2/ We are designing several building blocks in strong relationship with
the IETF RMT Working Group:
- ALC (Asynchronous Layered Coding) PI and LCT BB, compliant with the related RFCs
- FLUTE (v-07) is also implemented (some advanced features are missing, though) and successful interoperability tests have been carried out with three other implementations.
- The RLC and FLID-SL (static version only) congestion control protocols are also available, even if they are not documented in any I-D/RFC.
- NORM BB/PI is partially implemented: a great part of the stuff is already here, but it remains work under progress.
These softwares, that follow a GNU GPL licence, form the MCLv3 project
and are available at: http://www.inrialpes.fr/planete/people/roca/mcl/
3/ We are also developping an : Open Source Large Block LDPC/LDGM FEC building block.
This codec is available independantly (for use in other tools) and is also fully integrated in our ALC/FLUTE tools.
FYI, LDPC has recently been chosen to be included in the DVB-S2 standard.
This codec is distributed under a GNU LGPL licence, and is available at:
http://www.inrialpes.fr/planete/people/roca/mcl/
4/ Scalable Video Streaming over ALC solution: This software (not publically released yet), takes advantage of the unique ALC features to offer a massively scalable, TCP-friendly, and realistic streaming solution for any kind of hierarchically encoded video content.
5/ Concerning the server selection work: The application we are interested in is mainly the download of large files from web or ftp servers. We want the download to be done in a fast way. Later we will be extending our work to real time multimedia applications, where the objective will be to optimize the quality of the transmitted media. [Walid Dabbous et al.]

- Currently, there is no known to us application serving our needs for implementing a cache/proxy system for P2P CN systems and for this we are going to develop open source software compatible with popular and/or research P2P CN systems. A main effort will be devoted as to develop a system totally transparent to end users while being capable to adapt to the network topology without requiring special installation (like routers’ configuration). [Nikolaos Xipolias]

- Design/development of streaming CDN system based on P2P networking. Application area is large number of users, with the possibility of interactive access. [Karl-Andre Skevik]

- XLIM: Tool developed at UPM for the deployment of platfoms, overlay netwoeks... over the Internet supporting scenarios which include IPv6 /IPv4 transition scenarios, interconnection of multicast islands with unicast IP connectivity, Mobile Nodes using Mobile IP. The tool uses Java and XML-RPC. The first instances have been used to deploy IPsec and Isabel platforms, including a variety of components and services, such as media proxies (flowserver), gateways, Isabel interactive terminals, bandwidth allocations, IPsec Security Associations, etc. Future versions may include, quality of service configuration, launch of other kind of applications, secure access and management of resource GRIDs and platforms, open announcement of services and sessions. [Diego A. A. Ortiz et al.]

- Media on demand for Education, Audio-conferencing [Laurent Mathy]

- The Swarm system delivers streaming on-demand and live video stream sources. [Denney & Race]

- My idea is about a generic collaboration, so it should allow file sharing, audio and video streams, instant messaging, ... [Pau Artigaz]

- Mostly BitTorrent and Napster to obtain insights about users behaviors. [Guillaume Urvoy-Keller]

-          from simulations to real networks.
- implementation of markets rules in networks;
- develop mobile agents tool for simulators;
- prepare test systems:
    - collect information about networks parameters (including costs of data transmission between nodes and transfer);
    - implement negotiations between providers' agents and my service agents (costs of transmission, discounts, etc.);
    - present an offer of data transmission (low cost, QoS) to end-users; (FOR END-USERS)
    - suggestion of network reconfiguration (do reconfiguration in real time); (FOR PROVIDERS) [Tomasz Orzechowski]

What are your assumptions you about the infrastructure your solutions will be working in? (Please give a short description, like IPv4 vs. IPv6, IntServ vs. DiffServ vs. best-effort, commercial vs. academic, scale, structure etc.)

- Best effort. [Nikos Laoutaris]

- We envision an automatically reconfigurable overlay network providing QoS in a content distribution network built on today's Internet (see Trude’s work) . The CDN should have proxies cooperating and performing specialized caching of the content (me). This means Ip4 best effort. The scale is national to global, and if deployed would be of commercial interest. [Frank Johnsen]

- The systems and applications we design are to be run on the existing Internet as well as on ad-hoc networks. Thus, we assume best-effort QoS, eventual transition to IPv6. [Valentin Mesaros]

- IP based Networks (migrating from IPv4 to IPv6, no Qualtiy of Service orignially.
Heterogeneous networks also incoporating Satelite and propriatary solutions. Even a mixture of "QoS Enablers" (IntServ, DiffServe)
Scalability in terms of users can be small (professional use) but with high bandwidth requirements (up to 270 Mb/s) or a large number of users with broadcast/multicast transmissions of around 1Mb/s. There might be also on-demand use of a medium size user group.
Usage will be mainly commercial (B2B and B2C) [Andreas Mauthe]

- My QoS-aware overlay design assumes that it is built upon today's Internet, more spesificially we assume a collection of best-effort IPv4 networks. We are also considering the possibility of using services like DiffServ where these exist, but this is not a requirement for my work. We are envisioning a global scale network, consisting of several hundred caching proxies plus a handful of content servers. [Trude Hafsøe]

- IPv4, best-effort , academic, scale: not know yet (probably for doctors from 3 hospital, at leat at the beginning), structure: access only for authorised users. [Mikolaj Leszczuk]

- Concerning the V-Eye application, it runs on current best-effort IPv4 Internet with IP multicast (ASM and SSM).
The tools provided in the MCLv3 project are compatible with IPv4 and IPv6, and can be used either over a traditional Internet infrastructure (with ASM or SSM multicast routing), or in more specialized environments (FLUTE/ALC accomodate unidirectional mediums, like Satellites, DVB), or when scalability in terms of the number of clients is an issue.
The LDPC/LDGM codec can be used either along with the FLUTE/ALC family of protocols, or in distributed storage environments. LDPC has also recently been chosen to be included in the brand new DVB-S2 standard. Its fields of applications (and potentials) are therefore very broad.
The server selection proposed solution is at the application level and should work with any kind of network infrastructure [Walid Dabbous et al.]

- Our solution will be working at first in IPv4 environments, while later an IPv6 can be developed. Clearly, the system will be transparent as possible to end users and network administrators and thus a best-effort service will be provided. The solution is of academic interest at first; later on, commercial exploitation of the product will be explored. The solution is expected to scale in the size of an academic campus or a large ISP network. In the near future, collaborating hierarchies of systems will be explored (by developing the necessary communication protocols) for supporting larger scale environments or even the Internet at a whole [Nikolaos Xipolias]

- IPv4 and Ipv6, mainly best-effort, academic, large scale [Laurent Mathy]

- academic, best-effort, IPv4, small-scale [Jürgen Vogel]

- it is too early to talk about a given infrastructure but the intention was to consider different access networks including both diffServ vs. best-effort and commercial (DTV) as well as academic (P2P) [Zbigniew Hulicki]

- Subject to changes currently: IPv6 best effort, academic. Scale is unknown at this time, the p2p substructure should allow it to scale very well, which is the intention but the exact scalability isn't known yet. [Denney & Race]

- It makes no assumptions on the network itself, but it should cope with a big scale (potentially world size) and the basic idea is that you have some "isles/clusters/..." (collaboration centres like universities, schools, company sites) that collaborate between them, so you have some users that are close to each other (LAN) and the other are far away (WAN). [Pau Artigaz]

- Either we assume an overlay architecture, that is a set of machines distributed in the core of the network and controlled by a single ISP or, for the pure p2p content distribution, a pure best-effort network. [Guillaume Urvoy-Keller]

- Simulation methods - global network - IP v4 and IP v6 (later), QoS (?) [Tomasz Orzechowski]

Which papers have you recently published about your CN related work?
(Please provide the reference and/or the URL to the electronic version of the paper)

- Nikolaos Laoutaris, Hao Che, Ioannis Stavrakakis, "The LCD Interconnection of LRU Caches and Its Analysis," submitted in IEEE Transactions on Computers, 2004.

- Nikolaos Laoutaris, Vassilios Zissimopoulos, Ioannis Stavrakakis, "On the Optimization of Storage Capacity Allocation for Content Distribution," submitted in Computer Networks, 2003. [under second round review]

- Nikolaos Laoutaris, Vassilios Zissimopoulos, Ioannis Stavrakakis, "Joint Object Placement and Node Dimensioning for Internet Content Distribution," Information Processing Letters, Vol. 89, No. 6, pp. 273-279, March 2004.

- Nikolaos Laoutaris, Sofia Syntila, Ioannis Stavrakakis, "Meta Algorithms for Hierarchical Web Caches," in IEEE IPCCC 2004, Phoenix, Arizona, April 2004.

- Elias Balafoutis, Antonis Panagakis, Nikolaos Laoutaris, Ioannis Stavrakakis, "Study of the Impact of Replacement Granularity and Associated Strategies on Video Caching," accepted for publication in Cluster Computing , 2003.

- Ref: O. Ardaiz, L. Navarro, Xweb a Framework for Application Network Deployment in a Programmable Internet Service Infrastructure, EuroMicro 18th Paralel and Distributed Computing Conference Proceeding, Pag 398:405, IEEE Computer Press, 2004

- Bruno Carton and Valentin Mesaros. Improving the Scalability of Logarithmic-Degree DHT-based Peer-to-Peer Networks. To appear in Proc. of EUROPAR 2004. (draft) http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~valentin/pepito/Tango.ps

- Erik Klintskog, Valentin Mesaros, Zacharias El Banna, Per Brand and Seif Haridi. A Peer-to-Peer Approach to Enhance Middleware Connectivity. In Proc. of the International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems, OPODIS, December 2003. http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~valentin/pepito/p2p_middleware_opodis03.pdf

- Luc Onana, Valentin Mesaros, Peter Van Roy and Seif Haridi. NetProber: a Component for Enhancing Efficiency of Overlay Networks in P2P Systems. In Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing Systems, September 2002. http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~valentin/pepito/ieeenetprobe.pdf

- M. Zink, A. Mauthe: P2P Streaming using Multiple Description Coded Video (submitted to Euromicro 2004)

- A. Mauthe, P. Thomas: Professional Content Management Systems (Book appeared at Wiley)

- Michael Zink, Oliver Heckmann, Jens Schmitt, and Ralf Steinmetz. Polishing: A Technique to Reduce Variations in Cached Layer-Encoded Video. In Accepted for publication at the MMCN 2004, January 2004.

- „Digital Video Library for presentation of thoracic medicine resources”, MEDNET (Amsterdam, Holandia), http://www.kt.agh.edu.pl/~miklesz/publications/mednet2002/Mednet2002_DVL_LeszczukDuplaga.doc

- „Accuracy vs. Speed Trade-off in Detecting of Shots in Video Content for Abstracting Digital Video Libraries”, Springer-Verlag – IDMS-PROMS (Coimbra, Portugalia), http://www.kt.agh.edu.pl/~miklesz/publications/proms2002/PROMS.ppt

- T. Paila, M. Luby, R. Lehtonen, V. Roca, R. Walsh, ``FLUTE - File Delivery over Unidirectional Transport'', IETF RMT Working Group, draft-ietf-rmt-flute-07.txt (Work in Progress), December 2003. http://www.inrialpes.fr/planete/people/roca/doc/draft-ietf-rmt-flute-07.txt

- V. Roca, Z. Khallouf, J. Laboure, ``Design and Evaluation of a Low Density Generator Matrix (LDGM) large block FEC codec'', Fifth International Workshop on Networked Group Communication (NGC'03), Munich, Germany, September 2003. http://www.inrialpes.fr/planete/people/roca/doc/ngc03_ldpc.pdf

- C. Neumann, V. Roca, ``Scalable Video Streaming over ALC (SVSoA): a Solution for the Large Scale Multicast Streaming of Videos'', First International Workshop on 'Streaming Media Distribution over the Internet' (SMDI04), Athens, Greece, May 2004. http://www.inrialpes.fr/planete/people/roca/doc/SMDI04_SVSoA_neumann.pdf

- L. Mathy, N. Blundell, V. Roca, A. El-Sayed, ``Impacts of Simple Cheating in Application-Level Multicast'', IEEE INFOCOM 2004, Hong-Kong, March 2004. http://www.inrialpes.fr/planete/people/roca/doc/infocom04_alm_cheats.pdf

- "Isabel: An Application for real time Audience Interconnection over the Internet", J. Quemada, T. de Miguel, S. Pavon, G. Huecas, T. Robles, J. Salvachua, M. J. Perea, E. Moro, D. A. Acosta, J. A. Fernandez, F. Escribano, A. Diaz, J. L. Fernandez, Terena Networking Conference, Rodhes, June 2004. http://www.terena.nl/conferences/tnc2004/programme/presentations/show.php?pres_id=94

- EducaNext: A Framework for Sharing Live Educational Resources with Isabel, J. Quemada, G. Huecas, T. de Miguel, J. Salvachua, B. Rodriguez, B. Simon, K. Maillet, E. Law, WWW 2004 Conference, Education Track, Ney York, May 2004.

- EducaNext: Un servicio de intercambio de recursos educativos, J. Quemada, J. Rodriguez, G. Huecas, B. Rodriguez, T. de Miguel, B. Simon, K. Maillet, E. Law, V. Kamtisiou. Boletin de RedIris, no 66-67, Diciembre 2003 - Enero 2004, ISSN 1139-207X, pp 80-83 (http://www.rediris.es/rediris/boletin/66-67/ponencia19.pdf

- EducaNext: A Service for Knowledge Sharing, J. Salvachua, J. Quemada, B. Fernandez, G Huecas. UPGRADE, Special issue on e-Learning for Borderless Education, Vol. IV, issue no. 5, October 2003. http://www.upgrade-cepis.org/issues/2003/5/up4-5Salvachua.pdf

- EducaNext: un servicio para la compartición de conocimiento, J. Salvachúa, J. Quemada, B. Rodríguez, G. Huecas, NOVATICA, Numero especial sobre: Teleaprendizaje / e-Learning, vol 165, Octubre 2003, ISSN: 0211-2124 http://www.ati.es/novatica/2003/165/nv165sum.html

- Ch. 10. Sharing live educational resources in UNIVERSAL with ISABEL. J. Quemada, J. Salvachúa, G. Huecas, Blanca Rodríguez. BOOK: Computers and Education: Towards a Lifelong Learning Society, Kluwer Academic Publishers. Dordrecht The Netherlands. ISBN 1-4020-1599-2, pags: 115-126, 2003.

- Martin Mauve, Holger Füßler, Jörg Widmer, Thomas Lang. MobiHoc Poster: Position-based multicast routing for mobile Ad-hoc networks. ACM SIGMOBILE Mobile Computing and Communications Review (MC2R) 7 (3), pp. 53-55, July 2003. http://www.informatik.uni-mannheim.de/informatik/pi4/publications/html/Mauve2003c.html

- Jürgen Vogel, Jörg Widmer, Dirk Farin, Martin Mauve, Wolfgang Effelsberg. Priority-Based Distribution Trees for Application-Level Multicast. Proc. of NetGames 2003, Redwood City, CA, USA, May 2003. http://www.informatik.uni-mannheim.de/informatik/pi4/publications/html/Vogel2003a.html

- Security aspects in content delivery networks. 6^th World Multiconf. on Syst., Cybernetics and Informatics - SCI`02, July 14-18, 2002, Orlando, USA, vol. X, pp. 135-140.

- Denney J. C. & Race N. J. P. "The Impact of Wireless Device Access on Content Delivery Networks" International Workshop on Multimedia Interactive Protocols and Systems (MIPS 2003), University of Napoli Federico II, Napoli, Italy, November 18-21, 2003, Springer-Verlag Heidelberg, Volume 2899 / 2003 pp. 1 - 15, ISBN: 3-540-20534-9.

- Denney J. C. & Race N. J. P. "Dynamic System Adaptation in a Wireless-Aware Media Streaming Architecture" IEEE 3rd International Conference on Networking (ICN'04) Creole Beach Hotel, Gosier, Guadeloupe, French Caribbean, March 1-4, 2004.

- Luis Garces-Erice, Ernst W. Biersack, and Pascal A. Felber. MULTI+: Building Topology-Aware Overlay Multicast Trees. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Quality of Future Internet Services (QofIS'04), Barcelona, Spain, September 2004.

- Luis Garces-Erice, Pascal A. Felber, Ernst W. Biersack, Guillaume Urvoy-Keller, and Keith W. Ross. Data Indexing in Peer-to-Peer DHT Networks. In Proceedings of the 24th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), pages 200--208, Tokyo, Japan, March 2004.

- Anwar Al Hamra, Ernst W. Biersack, and Guillaume Urvoy-Keller. A Pull-Based Approach for a VoD Service in P2P Networks. In To appear in the 7th IEEE International Conference on High Speed Networks and Multimedia Communications (HSNMC), July 2004.

- M. Izal, G. Urvoy-Keller, E.W. Biersack, P. Felber, A. Al Hamra, and L. Garc\'es-Erice. Dissecting BitTorrent: Five Months in a Torrent's Lifetime. In Passive and Active Measurements 2004, April 2004.

- Ernst W. Biersack, Anwar Al Hamra, Guillaume Urvoy-Keller, and David Choi. Cost-optimal Dimensionig of a Large Scale Video on Demand Server. In Quality of Future Internet Services COST Action 263 Final Report, volume 2856 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer-Verlag, March 2003.

- CONCEPTS OF SYSTEMS FOR INFORMATION RETRIEVAL
CEEMAS'2001 Kraków, POLAND, ISBN 83-915953-0-7, (363-370)

- COMMUNICATION BETWEEN END-USERS AND DATABASES USING MOBILE AGENT TECHNOLOGY.
The IASTED IMSA’2001, USA, ISBN 0-88986-299-0, ACTA Press, (433-436)

- THE SYSTEM FOR DATA EXCHANGE AMONG DATABASES ORIENTED ON CORBA STANDARD AND MOBILE AGENT TECHNOLOGY.
The IEEE SIBCOM 2001, Russia, ISBN 0-7803-6611-5, IEEE 01EX452 (14-19)

- UPDATING SYSTEM FOR DISTRIBUTED DATABASES.
The IASTED CATE’2002, Mexico, ISBN 0-88986-332-6, ACTA Press, (421-425)

- META-DATA DISTRIBUTION IN INTELLIGENT DATABASES SYSTEM.
The IEEE EDM 2002, Russia, Vol. II, ISBN 5-7782-0380-2, IEEE 02EX518 (21-24)

- Orzechowski T., Ontology oriented systems of the access to information, The IEEE (SIBCON’2003) Tomsk. Russia;

How do you compare your work to related work and show that your solutions are better? (Please describe briefly your general approach, the main metrics you are using and the tools, etc.)

- Analytical/simulation comparison. In most cases I have used as metrics combinations of: hit ratio, byte hit ratio, average distance to hit (in multilevel caches) [Nikos Laoutaris]

- Our work compares to existing content networks, as Akamai, in that we provide an open infrastructure for application network deployment. On the other side we are using Grids for providing not only computationally intensive applications, but also interactive application services. [Oscar Ardaiz]

- None so far have utilized both internal and external structure of mixed media objects in a NoD scenario for caching. Closest related work is done in the area of VoD with examples such as the QBIX proxy and Zink's layered video. [Frank Johnsen]

- Probably, the most interesting is our last paper about our peer-to-peer system called Tango. "Improving the Scalability of Logarithmic-Degree DHT-based Peer-to-Peer Networks". In this paper we present a model to better characterize most of the current logarithmic-degree Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs). We express them in terms of absolute and relative exponential structured networks. In relative exponential networks, such as Chord, where all nodes are reachable in at most H hops, the number of paths of length inferior or equal to H between two nodes grows exponentially with the network size. We propose the Tango approach to reduce this redundancy and to improve other properties such as reducing the lookup path length. [Valentin Mesaros]

- Related work mostly focuses on only a subset of the metrics needed to provide QoS awareness, the most complete related work seem to focus on up to three different metrics (latency, hop-count and throughput), while we also need at least loss and jitter as metrics in our work.
In addition, much of the related work addresses network failures, and how to detect and recover from these, while my work also looks into smaller shifts in network traffic, and how these will influence a QoS aware overlay network.
The work that has been done on supplying QoS using overlay networks have not addressed the reconfiguration mechanism itself, and how this affects the overlay networks ability to offer QoS solutions. [Trude Hafsøe]

- There are not so many medical video libraries available online. Those which do exist, are rather simple progressive download solutions, rather than streaming ones. [Mikolaj Leszczuk]

- V-Eye is to our knowledge the first virtual environment (thus requiring many to many multicast) running on top of SSM.
The LDPC/LDGM codec is the only patent free, open source, GNU LGPL large block FEC codec available as of today, to the best of our knowledge. This high quality codec is already used (or seriously considered) in commercial environments.
The MCLv3 software has been the first open-source implementation of the ALC family of protocols, and has inspired two other FLUTE/ALC implementations available today.
The server selection work is based on the definition of a detailed metric for Internet paths. Our solution is designed to be transparent to clients. Only the servers are involved in the measurement process. [Walid Dabbous et al.]

- It appears that different P2P systems are popular across different continents. Also, different user profiles exist that prefer different object types (for example audio vs. video, song and movie video clips, etc). Such differences are magnified by the fact that across our continent, Europe, a lot of localized content exist that may exhibit nation-wide locality while being quite unpopular across country boundaries. Our work aims at providing i) necessary evidence in the form of trace files for unstudied P2P systems that are popular in Europe ii) improve significantly cache performance by employing new cache replacement policies (for example the Window-LFU and ARC) and iii) decrease bandwidth waste caused by overlay P2P CN systems by intelligently and adaptively placing cache/proxy systems that reform the underlying Internet topology. [Nikolaos Xipolias]

- Work still ongoing, but takes into consideration potential performance problems due to firewalls. [Karl-Andre Skevik]

- For ALM, we look at relative delay improvments of routing paths otherwise know as path stretch. We also look at the concentration of duplication on the underlying network links otherwise known as stress. [Nick Blundell]

- The most related tools to XLIM are XBONE and Globus Toolkit. The XLIM tool is designed to work over any kind of IP network, including unicast, multicast (and mixtures), IPv4/IPv6 transition scenarios, whereas XBONE needs multicast to work. XLIM supports the deployment of many independent platforms over a given network. We are currently analyzing the relation with Globus toolkit. [Diego A. A. Ortiz et al.]

- Mostly simulate and look at overhead metric such as network stress, messages per capita,etc. and delivery metrics such as delay stretch, latency, etc. [Laurent Mathy]

- Mostly simulation studies with ns-2 and self-implemented tools [Jürgen Vogel]

- There has been little research into a unified service structure to deliver streaming multimedia sources on new wireless and mobile platforms. Current initiatives generally focus on the optimisation of specific service members, such as server enhancements or mobile device middleware. Swarm takes a slightly higher level perspective and attempts to provide a homogenous p2p service, inherently dealing with mobility at a fundamental level.
There is increasing research into maintaining p2p topologies where the client set is composed on mobile devices. This works focuses entirely on the p2p structure and does not consider the effect of mobility on any specific application type, and as such can be considered as complementary to Swarm. [Denney & Race]

- Right now i haven't any solutions, but the main idea is about optimizing the performance according to the configuration with the "clusters" i've commented before, so is about minimising WAN traffic. [Pau Artigas]

- Main metrics: scalability (in terms of ressources, number of clients), network ressources required (amount of bw, cpu, disks). [Guillaume Urvoy-Keller]

- Mobile agents can operate on an user behalf. when an user can be off-line.
In many cases using mobile agents guarantee better performance of network resources.
(I tested an efficiency of search system with and without using mobile agents).
I proposed different strategies of information relocation with mobile agents usage for delivering data between twin databases located in different intranets. (The system was fully implemented and tested) [Tomasz Orzechowski]

Are there any aspects in your CN related work where you could benefit from collaboration with other E-NEXT members? For example things you cannot solve because you do not have enough resources? (Please describe briefly those aspect where you whish you could get some help)

- I would like to have better simulations with more realistic workloads and topologies. Although I have ran trace-driven simulations I haven't done it in really large scale so as to have rock solid results. It takes to much resources (human/computational).
Another thing relates to my previous work in multimedia streaming / playout adaptation. Although we proposed new scheduling mechanisms for video playout we never ran perceptual studies. We only did a "subjective" comparisson against other approaches (e.g., comparing the frequency and duration of underflows/overflows). [Nikos Laoutaris]

- At the moment, no. In the future I will want to perform simulations of cooperating proxies. Any ideas or feedback regarding this is welcome. [Frank Johnsen]

- We are interested in deploying, testing, and measuring our peer-to-peer system (P2PS) on an ad-hoc environment. [Valentin Mesaros]

- Infrastructure test, remote platforms [Andreas Mauthe]

- Ideas, hints, experiences on using the same techniques, other? [Mikolaj Leszczuk]

- We have an informal collaboration with L. Mathy, on Application Level Multicast techniques.
We have technical collaboration with the university of Tampere, Finland, on FLUTE/ALC aspects, as well as FEC schemes.
It would be interesting to perform experiments with other E-next members through Planetlab, for several activities (V-Eye tests, server selection). In fact for the latter, our solution requires the collaboration of servers. So having access to some servers in other E-next organizations will be very useful. . [Walid Dabbous et al.]

- Our work will benefit from collaboration with other E-NEXT members. It is expected that other members are also working on similar topics and can provide ideas, software development efforts, and necessary infrastructure for collecting and analyzing traces and gathering performance data from various locations around Europe [Nikolaos Xipolias]

- We would like to receive help in enhancing the XLIM tool with new features such as:
- Generalization to deploy other kind of overlay or Content Delivery Networks
- Development of a complete security framework
- Development of an open service announcement framework based on Web Services.
- etc. [Diego A. A. Ortiz et al.]

- Yes. Having a research CDN would be wonderful [Laurent Mathy]

- Content Creation: Exchange of related content
Content Delivery: Access to workstations in order to test protocols in realistic network topologies. [Jürgen Vogel]

- new ideas, suggestions; experience in service modelling and development multimedia applications good knowledge of P2P technology [Zbigniew Hulicki]

- Mostly the idea is about sharing ideas and a single project. [Pau Artigas]

- Clearly, the simulation of large scale content distribution remains a challenge for us. [Guillaume Urvoy-Keller]

- Exchange knowledge with everybody who is interested in Mobile Agents Technology for telecommunications network;
Improve my telecommunications knowledge in QoS, VPN area;
Not to spend time in doing useless work. Investigate only modern concepts in telecommunication networks in a wide group of people.
Prepare really great and modern doctoral thesis. [Tomasz Orzechowski]

What are from your point of view the grand challenges for future CN research? (Please give a short description)

- Much of my Ph.D. research and part of the post-doc research I intend to pursue is about how to build adaptive, decentralized CN over a heterogeneous "storage substrate" (P2P users, CDN nodes, caches, whatever pours storage to the bandwidth centric internet). [Nikos Laoutaris]

- We think the main challenge is how to construct open intrastructures where content and application services can adquire resources on demand. [Oscar Ardaiz]

- Cost effectiveness (i.e., utilizing the bandwidth as well as possible by performing caching in a content distribution network). Quality of service (i.e., having som means of giving at least statistical qos guarantees for traffic in the network). I'll be working closesly together with Trude HafsÃ¸e in order to combine her ideas about QoS in overlay networks with my partial caching scheme. [Frank Johnsen]

- Providing different degrees of QoS for highly dynamic overlay networks like ad-hoc and peer-to-peer systems. [Valentin Mesaros]

- How to cope with the heterogeneity in infrastructure, formats, applications and requirements
How to come to flexibel, dynamic, scalable systems that do still work [Andreas Mauthe]

- The ability to offer QoS support in large scale CDN network based on best-effort networks. [Trude Hafsøe]

- automatic content indexing, automatic content segmentation [Mikolaj Leszczuk]

- 1/ Deploy multimedia protocols to be widely used in current networks.
2/ Allow transparency of the access, taking into account network resources.
3/ ALC protocol [RFC 3450] is a key protocol, along with FLUTE, and they offer a broad range of applications. These standards are in no case limited to "reliable multicasting over the Internet" niche, but open new possibilities in many wireless environments, for Land Mobile Satellite communications. FLUTE is seriously considered to be part of the 3GPP, and possibly in other ETSI/DVB standardization bodies. [Walid Dabbous et al.]

- CN has traditionally focuses on a client-server model with one server. We believe that this model does not scale for the Internet and thus alternatives models, such as peer-to-peer should be studied. A successful example of such an approach is the “Skype” Internet telephony system. An open question is how these P2P can be efficiently organized as to reform the Internet topology (which follows the client-server architecture) and minimize bandwidth waste due to the dissimilarity of the overlay and underlying topology. Digital media emerge as a viable and preferable method for watching video and other copyrighted material. Because of this, both security (from the service provider and the copyright owner point of view) and privacy (from the end user point of view) emerge as an elementary requirement for such systems. It remains to be seen how a system can be developed as to meet the security requirements of the service provider and the copyright owner, while maintaining high-performance and simplicity of use [Nikolaos Xipolias]

- Mobile nodes, scalability, nodes cheating to improve their position in the overlay network. [Nick Blundell]

- The main challenges we see in CN are:
- Automatic optimal topology discovery
- Develpment of a complete security framework for Overlay Networks. [Diego A. A. Ortiz et al.]

- Building the said research CDN so new ideas can be tried out in the wild.
Accessing usage/request patterns.
Introducing autonomicity in CDN systems.
Access to real content. [Laurent Mathy]

- Overlay networks and multicast
Providing high quality content over best effort networks
Heterogenity of end-user devices (content adaption, individualized content) [Jürgen Vogel]

- I see Adaptability as the main challenge, with respect to both the media and delivery. How can media and networks be adapted to fit the characteristics of both the delivery path and the client, such that the very best quality of media can be delivered at all times, irrespective of any fluctuations. An further, how can this be provided to a diverse set of clients without compromising the system ability to distribute the media effectively. [Denney & Race]

- Dynamism, decentralisation and the use of end-systems. [Pau Artigas]

- As content distribution should apply more and more to real time constrained applications (e.g. VoD), a big challenge lies in the design of self measuring and self-adapting networks (real time identification of bottleneck, determinations of disjoint paths to reach the cleint, redirection of clients). Also, the scaling behavior in case of flashcrowd represents a major issues as we can expect all applications to suffer from sudden popularity peaks.
Lastly, the determination of the limits of a p2p approach as well as the design of "usefull" p2p applications (for back-up, virus updates in corporate environements, etc). [Guillaume Urvoy-Keller]

- Self-reorganization of network structure on the basis of MAT.
Improvement of efficiency when autonomous agents will operate on users behalf without any users attendance (negotiate, measure parameters, etc.)
Fully implemented market rules in networks (different providers, different routers in the same networks, unconstrained choice of network by end-users, auction mechanism in selling bandwidth, etc.) [Tomasz Orzechowski]

Which CN related publications are most important with respect to your project and or your thesis? (Please provide the reference and if possible a URL to the paper)

- The DHT related papers and everything having to do with resource placement on the internet (mirrors, caches, CDN nodes, etc.) [Nikos Laoutaris]

- @inproceedings{kim99clustered, author = "Y.-J. Kim and T. U. Choi and K. O. Jung and Y. K. Kang and S. H. Park and Ki-Dong Chung", title = "Clustered Multi-media {NOD}: Popularity-based Article Prefetching and Placement", booktitle = "{IEEE} Symposium on Mass Storage Systems", pages = "194-202", year = "1999", url = "citeseer.ist.psu.edu/535984.html" }

- I. Stoica, R. Morris et al. Chord: A Scalable Peer-To-Peer Lookup Service for Internet Applications. ACM SIGCOMM 2001. http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/stoica01chord.html

- I. Stoica, D. Adkins et al. Internet Indirection Infrastructure. IPTPS 2002. http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/stoica02internet.html

- L. Onana and S. El-Ansary et al.DKS(N, k, f): A Family of Low Communication, Scalable and Fault-Tolerant Infrastructures for P2P Applications, CCGRID2003.

- @inproceedings{ron, author = {David Andersen and Hari Balakrishnan and Frans Kaashoek and Robert Morris}, title = {Resilient overlay networks}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the eighteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles}, year = {2001}, isbn = {1-58113-389-8}, pages = {131--145}, location = {Banff, Alberta, Canada}, doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/502034.502048}, publisher = {ACM Press}, }

- @article{overqos, author = {Lakshminarayanan Subramanian and Ion Stoica and Hari Balakrishnan and Randy H. Katz}, title = {OverQoS: offering Internet QoS using overlays}, journal = {SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev.}, volume = {33}, number = {1}, year = {2003}, issn = {0146-4833}, pages = {11--16}, doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/774763.774764}, publisher = {ACM Press}, }

- @InProceedings{saxons, author = {Kai Shen}, title = {Saxons: Structure Management for Scalable Overlay Service Construction}, booktitle = {USENIX NSDI '04}, pages = {281---294}, year = {2004},

- O. Rose, “Simple and efficient models for variable bit rate MPEG video traffic”, Performance Evaluation, vol. 30, pp. 69-85, July 1997.
J. Roberts, U. Mocci, J. Virtamo, “Broadband network teletraffic”, Springer-Verlag, Berlin 1996, pp. 20-25.

- 1/ Multicast Overlay and P2P protocols papers
2/ Network performance measurement tools. Peer-to-peer architectures.
3/ ALC (RFC 3450)
4/ FLUTE: http://www.inrialpes.fr/planete/people/roca/doc/draft-ietf-rmt-flute-07.txt [Walid Dabbous et al.]

- "Unstructured" Application-level overlays. [Laurent Mathy]

- Chu, Y., Rao, S. G., Seshan, S., and Zhang, H. Enabling Conferencing Applications on the Internet using an Overlay Multicast Architecture. In: Proc. ACM SIGCOMM, San Diego, CA, USA, pages 55-67, August 2001.

- Chu, Y., Rao, S. G., and Zhang, H. A Case For End-System Multicast. In: Proc. ACM SIGMETRICS, Santa Clara, CA, USA, pages 1-12, June 2000.

- Francis, P. Yoid: Extending the InternetMulticast Architecture, April 2000. Unrefereed report, available at http://www.icir.org/yoid/docs/yoidArch.ps.gz.

- Helder, D. and Jamin, S. End-host Multicast Communication Using Switch-tree Protocols. In: Proc. CCGRID, Berlin, Germany, pages 419-424, May 2002.

- Ratnasamy, S., Francis, P., Handley, M., Karp, R., and Shenker, S. A Scalable and Content-Adressable Network. In: Proc. ACM SIGCOMM, San Diego, CA, USA, pages 162-171, August 2001.

- Ratnasamy, S., Handley, M., Karp, R., and Shenker, S. Application-Level Multicast using Content Addressable Networks. In: Proc. NGC, London, UK, pages 14-29, November 2001.

- Ratnasamy, S., Handley, M., Karp, R., and Shenker, S. Topologically-Aware Overlay Construction and Server Selection. In: Proc. IEEE INFOCOM, New York, NJ, USA, June 2002.

- Zhuang, S. Q., Zhao, B. Y., Joseph, A. D., Katz, R., and Kubiatowicz, J. Bayeux: An Architecture for Scalable and Fault-tolerant Wide-area Data Dissemination. In: Proc. NOSSDAV, Port Jefferson, NY, USA, pages 11-20, June 2001.

- Winter etc. al Have done complementary publications into mobile p2p topologies. http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/~winter/publications.htm

- P2P streaming: M. Castro, P. Druschel, A-M. Kermarrec, A. Nandi, A. Rowstron and A. Singh, "SplitStream: High-bandwidth multicast in a cooperative environment", SOSP'03,Lake Bolton, New York, October, 2003.
P2P file replication: http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/bittorrentecon.pdf

Which CN related projects you regard as important?
(Please provide name of the project and URL)

- none spring to mind, due to the specific area of research we have chosen for INSTANCE II [Frank Johnsen]

- Internet Indirection Infrastructure (i3) http://i3.cs.berkeley.edu/

- Most relevant are Resilient Overlay Networks (RON), OverQoS and Saxons [Trude Hafsøe]

- A. Winter, “Video Capture Software and Scene Detection – Scenalyzer”, http://www.scenalyzer.com/.
Roxio, Inc., “Products -> VideoWave -> Overview”, http://www.roxio.com/en/products/videowave/.
IBM, “DB2 AIV Extenders - DB2 Video Extender - IBM Software”, http://www.ibm.com/software/data/db2/extenders/aiv/video.html [Mikolaj Leszczuk]

- XBONE http://www.isi.edu/xbone/ , Globus toolkit http://www.unix-globus.org/toolkit [Diego A. A. Ortiz et al.]

- Content Addressable Networks (CAN) and Distributed Hash Tables (DHT)
Resilient Overlay Networks (http://nms.lcs.mit.edu/ron/)
End-System Multicast (http://esm.cs.cmu.edu/technology.html) [Jürgen Vogel]

- Streaming Media System Research: http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/mmsl/projects/streaming.html
Pastry: http://research.microsoft.com/~antr/Pastry/ [Denney & Race]

- For now i can't say any special one but to say some i would say spread (www.spread.org) as a group messaging overlay, naradabrokering (www.naradabrokering.org) or scribe (http://www.research.microsoft.com/~antr/SCRIBE/default.htm) as a publish/subscribe system, jxta (www.jxta.org) or pastry (http://research.microsoft.com/~antr/Pastry/) as peer-to-peer systems ... [Pau Artigas]

Any other information, comments etc. on CN related research that you want to share with the other E-NEXT members?
(Just go ahead ...)

- Its been very difficult for me to convince that some of my ideas are indeed making a worthwhile gain; that is, despite that the analytic results (under some assumptions) look good. Running simulations that involve multiple nodes and lengthy workloads is an overwhelming task. Combine that with the time/energy required to come up with innovative ideas and deal with the huge literature and you have an overwhelmed student. In my experience it is very difficult to cover all aspects of a CN related issue without cooperation. I think that there is an inherent difficulty in this area because it involves "multiple" of everything (multiple content nodes, multiple users, multiple protocols). It is easier to develop/test ideas in "single node research" (scheduling in a single node, replacement in a single node, etc.) [Nikos Laoutaris]

- I truly believe, E-NEXT is going to become really excellent information, idea and experience exchange forum. [Mikolaj Leszczuk]

- For any further information and/or inquires, you can contact Prof. Dimitrios N. Serpanos (serpanos@ee.upatras.gr). [Nikolaos Xipolias]

- The problem of nodes cheating in overlay networks has yet been unresolved and will, unless tackled, inevitably lead to deployment problems of currently proposed overlay network protocols. [Nick Blundell]

- My idea was to work on Overlays, mainly at a generic level. [Pau Artigas]

- It is really good occasion for me to exchange a knowledge, improve my English a little, meet interesting people and prepare really good doctoral thesis. [Tomasz Orzechowski]

Please list your name and e-mail here such that we can get in touch with you for follow-up questions/discussions and can honor your contribution appropriately.

- Nikos Laoutaris, laoutaris@di.uoa.gr

- Oscar Ardaiz, oardaiz@ac.upc.es

- Frank T. Johnsen, frankjo@ifi.uio.no

- Valentin Mesaros, Universite catholiqué de Louvain, Belgium, valentin@info.ucl.ac.be, http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~valentin

- Andreas Mauthe, andreas.mauthe@kom.tu-darmstadt.de

- Trude Hafsøe

- Mikolaj Leszczuk, AGH University of Science and Technology,
Dept. of Telecommunications, al. Mickiewicza 30, 30-059 Krakow, Poland, mailto:leszczuk@kt.agh.edu.pl, http://www.kt.agh.edu.pl/~miklesz/

- Walid Dabbous, Thierry Turletti, Vincent Roca, Chadi Barakat, Contact: (firstname.name@inria.fr)

- Nikolaos Xipolias & Dimitrios N. Serpanos (serpanos@ee.upatras.gr) University of Patras

- Karl-André Skevik, karlas@ifi.uio.no

- Nick Blundell, n.blundell@comp.lancs.ac.uk

- Diego Andrés Acosta Ortiz <acosta@dit.upm.es>, Juan Luis Fernández Rodríguez <jlf@dit.upm.es> , Maria Jose Perea Moraleda <mjperea@dit.upm.es> , Juan Quemada <jquemada@dit.upm.es>

- Laurent Mathy, laurent@comp.lancs.ac.uk

- Jürgen Vogel, vogel@informatik.uni-mannheim.de

- Zbigniew Hulicki, hulicki@kt.agh.edu.pl

- Justin Denney, denneyj@comp.lancas.ac.uk & Nicholas Race race@comp.lancs.ac.uk

- Pau Artigas Vidal, partigas@ac.upc.es

- Ernst W. Biersack, erbi@eurecom.fr & Guillaume Urvoy-Keller

- Tomasz Orzechowski tomeko@agh.edu.pl