Tutorials
| TT1 | Wolfgang Kleinwächter | Internet Governance |
| TT2 | João Barros | Network Information Theory: Principles and Applications |
| TT3 | Mikhail Smirnov | Cognitive Radio Control: The Disappearing Policy |
TT1 - Internet Governance
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Wolfgang KleinwächterAbstract: The Governance of Critical Internet Ressources (CIR) - this is Root Servers, Domain Names, IP Adresses and Internet Protocols - is one of the most controversial issues in Internet policy. Grown bottom up in the shadow of governmental regulation in the 1970s and 1980s, the management of CIRs was developed as a multilayer multiplayer mechanism with no central authority, driven by the private sector and user needs and without the involvement of governments. With the growth of the Internet there was a need to move towards a more institutionalized system to guarantee the stability and security of the Internet. In 1998 a private corporation - ICANN - was established with the mandate to coordinate policies with regard to the CIRs. However, ICANN operated under a special contract with the US government (USG). It was the plan of the Clinton administration to privatize fully the DNS and CIR management, however, the Bush administration did never follow this line and continued with its oversight over ICANN. The present Joint Project Agreement (JPA) between ICANN and the US Department of Commerce (DOC) terminates in October 2009. During the UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), China wanted to substitute ICANN by an UN organisation while the EU proposd a mixed system which would have put ICANN under the oversight of an intergouvernmental council. The UN Working Grpup on Internet Gpovernance (WGIG) which was established by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan after the first WSIS phase in 2004, reached consensus that the Internet should ot by managed by one single organisation but by a network of various players, including all stakeholders, that is private sector, civil society, governments and the technical community. WGIG proposed to deepend the discussion on the issue and to establish an "Internet Governance Forum" (IGF) where all involved stakeholders should have a right to participate on equal footing. A process of improved communication, coordination and collaboration among all stakeholders should identify enhanced or alternative options for a future management of CIRs. The UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF) was established in 2006 and had recently its 3rd meeting in Hyderabad. The IGF has no decision making capacity. The mandate of the IGF terminates in 2010, however there is an option for a continuation of the UN general Assembly, based on a receommednation of the UN Secretary General, wants to continue. In the meantime, the new US Administration under president Barack Obama has to make a decision how to continue its cooperation with ICANN after the termination of the JPA in October 2009.
The tutorial will go into the basic issues of Internet Governance, discuss the mandate and the policies of ICANN, including issues like broadening of the domain name space by the introduction of new gTLDs and internationalized Domain Names (iDNs), the transition vfom IPv4 to IPv6, challenges like the management of data protection issues in the Whois database and other Internet Governance related issues, as they are discussed in the framework of the IGF. A final section of the tutorial will discuss emerging issues, in particular the governance challenges which come with the "Internet of Things" (IOT), and here the various options for a global management mechanism for the "Object Naming System " (ONS).
Short Bio: Wolfgang Kleinwaechter is a Professor for International Communication Policy and Regulation at the Department for Media and Information Sciences of the University of Aarhus / Denmark.
He has studied Communication, International Law and International Relations at the University of Leipzig (B.A. 1971, M.A. 1974, Ph.D. 1981) Since 1998 he teaches a full Master Course on "Internet Policy and Regulation" at the University of Aarhus. His academic teaching experiences include Institute for International Studies, University of Leipzig (until 1991), Department for Communication, University of Tampere (1991/1992 and again since 2005), School of International Services, American University, Washington, D.C, (1992/1994), Department for Media and Communication Studies, University of Oerebro (2002/2003), Faculty of Journalism, Moscow State University (2008) and Heilbronn Business School (2008).
He was involved in numerous EU projects. From 1994 to 1998 he was the Chairman of the Management Board of the "Inter-Regional Information Society Initiative" (IRISI) of the European Commission in Brussels and coordinated the regional "Saxonian Information Initiative" (SII) for the local government of the Free State of Saxony in Germany. He was a member of FP 5 and FP 6 projects like ETHOS, IMAGINE, MIDAS and TELECITIES. Since 1997 he worked as an evaluator for various EU programms and chaired the Safer Internet Action Plan (SIAP) evaluation team for the EU Commission in 2006. Currently he is a partner in the FP 7 project "Next Generation Internet /EURO-NF" and member of the 2008 SIAP Evaluation team.
He is involved in Internet Governance issues since the mid 1990s and has participated in all ICANN meetings from 1999 onwards. He was a member of ICANN Membership Information Task Force (MITF) and the Steering Committee of At Large (2001/2002). 2005/2007 he was a voting member of ICANNs Nomination Committee
TT2 - Network Information Theory: Principles and Applications
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João BarrosAbstract: Since Shannon's A Mathematical Theory of Communication a lot has been accomplished in terms of characterizing and achieving the maximum achievable rate (i.e. the capacity) at which two partners can communicate over a noisy channel with arbitrarily small probability of error. Given the success of information theory in mastering point-to-point communications, one would be tempted to believe that a complete treatment of information flows over large networks with multiple communicating partners should not stay elusive for long. As it turns out, establishing the fundamental limits of communication over networks and designing near-to-optimal protocols and algorithms remain formidable tasks, which require a strong leap in conceptual tools and technical sophistication.
Under the motto "there is nothing more practical than a good theory", this tutorial priviliges intuition over mathematical proofs in order to provide an introductory overview of some of the main results, applications and challenges that characterize the general area of network information theory. Particular attention will be given to multiple access communications, broadcast channels, distributed compression and relay networks. We shall also highlight the emergent area of network coding, where intermediate nodes are allowed to mix different packets, thus providing robust solutions for wireless networking and peer-to-peer content distribution.
Short Bio: João Barros is an Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Porto and the coordinator of the Porto Laboratory of the Instituto de Telecomunicações. He received his undergraduate education in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Universidade do Porto (UP), Portugal and Universitaet Karlsruhe, Germany, until 1999, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM), Germany, in 2004. From 2005 to 2008, João Barros was an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science of the School of Sciences of the University of Porto. The focus of his research lies in the general areas of information theory, communication networks and data security. Dr. Barros received a Best Teaching Award from the Bavarian State Ministry of Sciences, Research and the Arts, as well as scholarships from several institutions, including the Fulbright Commission and the Luso-American Foundation. He held visiting positions at Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he spent a sabbatical in 2008. Beyond his duties as Secretary of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society, his service included co-chairing the 2008 IEEE Information Theory Workshop in Porto, Portugal, and participating in numerous Technical Program Committees, including ITW 2009, WiOpt (2008 and 2009), ISIT 2007, and Globecom (2007 and 2008).
TT3 - Cognitive Radio Control: The Disappearing Policy
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Mikhail SmirnovAbstract: The purpose of this tutorial is to report very recent results on policy-based self-management, first towards self-adaptive and Cognitive Radio Systems (CRS), and then eventually to cognitive networking. The focus will be on self-learning policy and cognition; the tutorial will show that self-* properties appear as the result of cognition. The tutorial will elaborate on domain-specific cognition model and on the role of context and policy in that model; specific emphasis will be given to policy multiplexing (this is where a policy disappears becoming embedded in to the fabric of other functionalities), on process correctness (cross disciplinary approach based on information modelling and theory, control theory), on assessment of CRS (~"Turing test" for cognitive radio), and emerging design methodology of CRS.
For setting the scene this tutorial shall compare the multiplexing phenomena in wired and wireless, in cognitive and non-cognitive; shall explain why the idea of cognitive radio is feasible, and why policies are so important for this, and what are the essential requirements the spectrum policies must satisfy in order to enable the learning, and by learning enabling better (cost-efficient, fair, robust, and versatile) communications. At this point policy types and categories will need to be introduced; this is best done on the background of policy evolution.
The tutorial shall make a very condensed overview of the evolution of policy concept; by explaining the roots and the progress of the policy concepts the tutorial shall highlight important terms and properties. For example, when dealing with security policies the scalability property will be discussed; when dealing with configuration policies policy deployment modes will be discussed. Various flavours of policy taxonomy (ICL, NIST, DMTF, IETF, TMF, DENng, ACF, etc.) will be compared with the attempt to semi-formally define necessary key requirements for policies that shall enable cognitive radio control in a truly autonomic - radically distributed and collaboration based - manner.
The notation that should be used throughout the tutorial is novel and is specifically invented to meet the requirements of cognition and policy multiplexing). Using the above notation the tutorial shall present a model of self-learning policy - the key to cognition algorithms and to the robust control by policies. The model and the notation capabilities shall be verified by their application to classical problems, such as remote method invocation dilemma [F. Arbab], kindergarten rules for smart radios [P, Baran], and to recently proposed algorithms for open spectrum access, flexible spectrum management, and opportunistic networking.
Much discussed policy agility property will be addressed by this tutorial showing that the challenge of cognitive networking is not only to embed cognition in the radio control loop[s] but also not to embed policies into the radio; the policy agility requires that policies are learned, and if needed forgot, and when needed remembered. This challenge - luckily! - can be rigorously formulated as a control theoretical problem, which in turn allows us to describe the proposed assessment framework formally.
In this tutorial the domain-specific Turing test will be described. the tutorial shall introduce important notions of situation (perceived context), situation generation (background and foreground, points of control and observation, etc.), wireless ecosystem (composition of behaviours and policies), process correctness (contrary to point correctness known in testing, optimization, etc.), assessment as the evaluation of learning related to the purpose. The assessment framework shall be introduced with the use of building blocks with model-driven behavioural composition being one of the major ones.
Various driving models helping to self-manage various radio communication functions can be generated based on the extended policy domain - a radio-specific information model comprised of roles, behaviours, policies, resource and situation models. The tutorial shall explain that the generic engine behind all the models is a Self-Awareness Function that provides the governance to other functions and is the internal key to cognition, while policy is the external one. Based on this the tutorial shall provide an overview of the emerging methodology of CRS design.
This tutorial shall conclude with the summary of main findings, put these findings into the perspective of on-going network convergence, and outline promising areas of future work in the area of CRS.
Short Bio: Dr., Ass. Prof. Mikhail Smirnov is Direktorium member of Fraunhofer FOKUS with research interests in advanced Internet services, self-organisation and self-management of network features, policy-based networking and policy-based programmability. M. Smirnov serves the community as COMNET area editor, international conferences chair and TPC member for more than 50 conferences and journals. Dr. Smirnov is EU Commission expert in high performance networking and future and emerging technologies.