Conference Agenda – TBA

Registration – TBA

Hotel Reservation –
The Madison Concourse Hotel
The following URL is set up for our conference:
https://bookings.ihotelier.com/The-Madison-Concourse-Hotel-and-Governor%27s-Club/bookings.jsp?hotelID=6388&groupID=1033948

If you plan to call for reservation, please mention hotel code: “Geni17“.

Travel Grants
Travel grants to GEC 17 are available to US academics. The purpose of these grants is to increase participant diversity. Click this link for travel grant instructions. The travel grant application deadline is June 17, 2013.

Host a Conference
If you are interested in hosting a future conference, visit the GEC Hosting Requirements page for more information.

The 16th GENI Engineering Conference, hosted by Robert Ricci and the University of Utah, was held in Salt Lake City, Utah from March 19 through March 21.

Over 220 people from academia, industry, government and international participated in this GEC.  A large number of attendees were newcomers interested in using GENI for their research or in their classroom.  One of these newcomers, Prof. Violet Syrotiuk of Arizona State University, started using GENI in her networking class the week after the GEC.

This GEC marked the opening of the GENI Portal to experimenters.  80 people participated in the “Getting Started with GENI and the GENI Portal” tutorial.  The portal makes it easy for experimenters to get started quickly with GENI and run simple experiments.  This ease of use of the portal was appreciated by many of the attendees; at least three of them have done or are planning on doing portal tutorials at their home institutions for their students and colleagues.

Other hands-on tutorials at the GEC included using the GEMINI instrumentation system on InstaGENI racks, using the GIMI instrumentation system on ExoGENI racks, running WiMAX based experiments and instrumenting then with GIMI, advanced networking experiments based on software routers and the TiMIX traffic generation tool, and developing simple OpenFlow controllers.

The GEC also included sessions for GENI developers and for campus IT staff deploying GENI or planning on deploying GENI.  The sessions for GENI developers included: (1) A Service Developers Roundtable where groups developing services on GENI (currently the I&M service developers) described their experiences with and plans for developing services on GENI, (2) An Aggregate Developers session where aggregate providers discussed the status of the GENI AM API v3 deployments, re-factoring of GENI RSpecs vs. RSpec extensions, and stitching, and (3) A Common Experimenter Experience session where representatives from the InstaGENI and ExoGENI rack teams discussed areas where differences between these racks are valuable and important to experimenters and areas where differences could be eliminated to make it easier for experimenters to deploy experiments on both racks.

Sessions for campus IT staff included: (1) A GENI Racks at Campuses and Regionals session where speakers provided updates on progress related to the GENI meso-scale deployment and operations and (2) An Operations and Monitoring session where the status of the GENI Service Desk at Indiana University and the deployment of monitoring software were discussed.

The plenary session at the GEC featured two very impressive experiments on GENI.  The first, led by Russ Clark of Georgia Tech, connected the Georgia Tech Aware Home to the GENI backbone for an augmented reality demonstration that included real-time interaction with devices and people in the Aware Home.    The second, led by Rick McGeer of HP, created a slice containing GENI resources from the US and resources from testbeds in Brazil, Belgium, Germany, Japan and Canada.   This experiment created a distributed cloud that was then used by an application that processed satellite imagery to estimate the amount of greenery in cities around the world.

Russ Clark of Georgia Tech

At the demo night, a regular event at the GECs, featured more than 30 demos.  Videos of select demos have been posted on the GENI YouTube channel.

The ever popular Coding Sprint/Experimenter tutoring session was once again well attended.  It included operators discussing FOAM installations and monitoring, experimenters working through tutorial exercises, and aggregate developers having several group discussions.

Details of the GEC sessions including presentations and tutorial material from these sessions are available at http://groups.geni.net/geni/wiki/GEC16Agenda.

Demo night event

The second GENI Research and Educational Experiment workshop (GREE2013) was held in conjunction with GEC16. GREE2013 opened with a keynote speech from Rutgers WINLAB’s Dipankar Raychaudhuri, principal investigator of the Mobility First Future Internet Architecture project and concluded with an ExoGENI tutorial. The workshop accepted a total of twenty-one full papers, short papers, and work-in-progress reports. Best paper awards were presented to “WiMAX in the Classroom: Designing a Cellular Networking Hands-on Lab,” best educational experiment paper, by Jelena Marasevic, Jan Janak, Henning Schulzrinne, and Gil Zussman and “GENI WiMAX Performance: Evaluation and Comparison of Two Campus Testbeds,” best research experiment paper, by  Fraida Fund, Cong Wang, Thanasis Korakis, Michael Zink, and Shivendra Panwar. Papers will be indexed by IEEE.

The winners of GREE2013, Cong Wang (left) and Jelena Marasevic (right) with Mark Berman (middle) of GPO presented the awards.

• A review of GENI Solicitation 4.  The GPO will describe the objectives of this solicitation so potential proposers have the opportunity to better target their proposals to advancing GENI needs.  The GEC will be a good opportunity for proposers to talk to potential teammates and discuss ideas with the GPO.
• Opening up of the GENI Portal for use by all experimenters.  This portal was demonstrated at the last GEC and has been under beta-testing since then. The portal will be used by an introductory tutorial at the GEC.

Tutorials at GEC16 will range from entry-level tutorials that cover basic experimentation and instrumentation with GENI to more advanced tutorials such as programming networks using OpenFlow.  All tutorials will be hands-on and attendees are strongly encouraged to bring their laptops to these sessions.

Also of interest to experimenters will be an Experimenter Drop-in Session for help with their software, whether it be exercises they were unable to complete at a tutorial or experiments related to their research.  An experimenter help desk will also be available during the breaks on Days 1 and 2 of the conference.

Conference sessions directed at campus IT staff will cover details of the GENI racks hardware and software, site requirements for hosting GENI racks, and procedures for commissioning and operating these racks.

Session for GENI developers will include discussions on the GENI aggregate manager API, the GENI stitching APIs and VLAN programmability.  This GEC will continue with the popular Coding Sprint sessions where developers work together to resolve issues related to implementing the GENI APIs and other functions.  The developers are also available to help experimenters with their software.

The Demos and Poster reception  the evening of March 19 will feature demonstrations of GENI experiments, GENI tools and services and of projects related to or complementary to GENI.

Conference Agenda

Registration

Hotel – Hotel accommodations are available at the University Guest House and the Little America Hotel.
Please note: Little America will be used as our overflow Hotel and it is not the GEC 16 Conference Location

Travel Grants
Travel grants to GEC16 are available to US academics. The purpose of these grants is to increase participant diversity. Click this link for travel grant instructions. The travel grant application deadline is February 13, 2013.

Host a Conference
If you are interested in hosting a future conference, visit the GEC Hosting Requirements page for more information.

MobilityFirst Project

The MobilityFirst project assumes the future of the Internet is dominated by mobile devices, and that the Internet architecture at that time should fully support mobile devices without any special gateways or proxies, and provide service that is robust even as wireless links are disconnected and then re-connected. MobilityFirst is led by Dipankar “Ray” Raychaudhuri, director of WINLAB at Rutgers University, and is scheduled to run through September 2013.  As PI, Ray leads a large team of researchers, including those from eight other universities plus collaborators at several industrial research organizations.

See Figure 1 and the ACM AINTEC 2011 conference paper (by Ivan Seskar, et. al.) for a summary of the MobilityFirst architecture.  The core network is comprised of multiple domains, with connectionless communication driven by a hybrid combination of name- and address-based routing.  The routers are integrated with storage and computing resources.  A large, scalable Global Name Resolution Service (GNRS) binds the name of a network attached object to its current address.  Names are applied to devices, content and context, enabling context- and location-aware services. Self-certifying public key based identifiers for objects (i.e., their GUIDs) provide for an inherently trustworthy network.  There is edge-aware inter-domain routing, and storage-aware intra-domain routing.  End devices may home to multiple wireless domains, transferring packets wherever there is a connection.  When disconnected from the global network, devices may form ad-hoc wireless networks.

Figure 1. MobilityFirst Architecture

MobilityFirst Proof-of-Concept Prototype Using GENI Resources

An important task in the MobilityFirst project is to validate the architecture with prototypes.  First, key components were prototyped, including a network router, a host protocol stack and support services that embody the routing and name resolution services.

Second, a proof-of-concept prototype of the MobilityFirst architecture was demonstrated at GEC12

in late 2011 by Kiran Nagaraja of WINLAB .  The prototype included a Click-based router with name resolution (GNRS) and storage-aware routing functions (GSTAR), and the Linux/Android implementations of the host protocol stack.  An API provided a socket-like interface to all MobilityFirst services, including unicast, multicast, and anycast message delivery, content querying and retrieval, and multi-homing.

This demonstration utilized a wide variety of GENI resources as shown in Figure 2 to implement the prototype and support a robust content delivery service from one multi-homed  device (GUID_101) with Wi-Fi and WiMAX network access,  to another (GUID_201).  It consisted of seven routers deployed on programmable ProtoGENI hosts spread across the US, with two edge networks (located at BBN, Cambridge, MA and WINLAB, Rutgers, North Brunswick, NJ), each having a WiMAX base station and a WiFi access point for end user mobile device access

Figure 2. MobilityFirst Prototype Using GENI Resources to Provide Robust Content Delivery

The current MobilityFirst prototyping effort is aimed at showing that key MobilityFirst features, such as the GUID naming scheme and storage aware routing, can be supported using Software Defined Networks (SDNs) based on OpenFlow technology. A demo at GEC15 showed that such features could be implemented on an OpenFlow switch by using appropriate control  programs, and that client mobility can be handled seamlessly in an OpenFlow configuration. At GEC16 the demo showed MobilityFirst federated the GENI backbone with other MobilityFirst sites and with Japan.

This work in using GENI to prototype the MobilityFirst FIA is a step towards fulfilling GENI’s vision is to become the “world’s first laboratory environment for exploring future internets at scale, promoting innovations in network science, security, technologies, services and applications.”

• A demonstration of a prototype implementation of the eXpressive Internet Architecture (XIA) Future Internet Architecture. A team of XIA researchers led by Peter Steenkiste of CMU showed XIA running over a federated configuration including both GENI resources and VNode resources in Japan.
• Plenary demonstrations of experiments run on GENI by Prasad Calyam of Ohio State University and Ashish Vulimiri of the University of Illinois. In addition, Niky Riga of the GENI Project Office ran through a complete experiment on GENI from logging in to her GENI account to archiving the results of her experiments.
• Reports and demonstrations by Joe Mambretti of Northwestern University and Aki Nakao of the University of Tokyo on GENI’s international collaborations such as the Slice Around the World (an advanced international distributed programmable environment for network research) and the federation of the Japan VNode infrastructure with GENI.
• A demonstration of the new GENI Clearinghouse and Experimenter Portal by the GPO.
• A demonstration of the GENI-in-a-Box software package, developed by the GPO, that is now available to experimenters. This package includes a small GENI aggregate that can be used to set up and run small experiments entirely on the experimenter’s computer.
• A progression of tutorials for novice experimenters starting with simple experiments using the Flack graphical experimenter tool to tutorials that used more advanced tools such as Omni and services such as the GEMINI and GIMI instrumentation systems. There was also a tutorial on advanced networking experimentation with GENI that used the GENI OpenFlow backbone network.
• Tutorials based on the soon to be deployed InstaGENI and ExoGENI racks and the GEMINI and GIMI instrumentation and measurement systems that will be available for these rack resources.
• GEC15 continued with the popular and successful Coding Sprint where a number of GENI design decisions were resolved and experimenters got help with their software.

GEC 15 Participants

All the presentation materials have or will be posted at http://groups.geni.net/geni/wiki/GEC15Agenda.

Finally, this GEC marked the transition of the technical leadership of the NSF GENI project from Chip Elliott to Mark Berman. The transition was solemnized by Robert Ricci of the University of Utah by presenting Mark with a Texas cowboy hat.

Conference Agenda

Registration – TBA

Hotel – Hotel accommodations are available at the University Guest House and the Little America Hotel.
Please note: Little America will be used as our overflow Hotel and it is not the GEC 16 Conference Location

Travel Grants
Travel grants to GEC16 are available to US academics. The purpose of these grants is to increase participant diversity. Click this link for travel grant instructions. The travel grant application deadline is February 13, 2013.

Host a Conference
If you are interested in hosting a future conference, visit the GEC Hosting Requirements page for more information.

The GENI Program Office is making available a new service for members of the GENI community: the GENI Prototype Clearinghouse and Portal. This service, which was opened to selected initial users as of GEC15 (October 23-25, 2012) and currently we have 14 early adopters registered on the portal. Several have provided useful feedback. The represented institutions are: CMU (XIA project), Rutgers, UNC, Columbia, Purdue, University of Kentucky, University of Utah, and Princeton University. This Portal will be open to the full GENI community by early 2013, provides interfaces to critical federation resource management services.

The GENI Clearinghouse provides services to establish the trust relationships and policies that constitute the GENI federation of aggregates (resource providers). The Clearinghouse establishes the trust root for all GENI credentials (of users, slices, aggregates) so that services providers and consumers can safely interoperate. The Clearinghouse also provides an enforcement point for federation-level policies and coordinates with the GMOC (GENI Meta-Operations Center) to ensure monitor that behavior of experimenters adheres to federation policies. Additionally, the Clearinghouse provides federation-level logging services to support forensics services along with the GMOC.

Figure 1. A screen shot of the prototype GENI Portal, providing easy access to GENI federation services and resources.

The GENI Portal is a web interface that provides single-sign-on access to GENI resources and services. Based on feedback from GENI experimenters, the goal of the Portal is to “make the easy things easy and the difficult things possible”. To that end, the Portal seeks to make it easy for beginner experimenters and students to build and access GENI resources topologies in a matter of a few clicks. More experienced users with more sophisticated needs can use the Portal as well as the range of other existing GENI experimenter tools to build, run and analyze their experiments.

The Clearinghouse and Portal are being made available as prototypes, in hopes that they will soon be generally available production assets for the full GENI community of experimenters. The GENI Program Office is soliciting early testers for the Portal and Clearinghouse to provide valuable user feedback.

The 15th GENI Engineering Conference (GEC15) will be held Oct 23 – 25,  2012 at University of Houston, Houston, TX. The ever-popular GENI Demo Night will be held during the evening of Tuesday, Oct 23rd at the University of Houston Alumni Center.

GEC15 is a great place to learn how to use GENI, to get hands-on help running your experiments, and to meet many of the most active networking and distributed systems researchers from across the United States. Newcomers and new graduate students are especially welcome, and may apply for travel grants for full funding (see below).

The agenda features:

• Extensive “hands on” tutorial sessions, both beginning and advanced
• Coding sprints to help you get your experiments running
• Planning for GENI’s expansion across dozens of campuses
• Design discussions and demonstrations of new GENI features including the GENI Portal, instrumentation, and SDN research

Conference Agenda

Registration

Hotel
The Hilton Americas-Houston
1600 Lamar
Houston, Texas, 77010, USA

800-236-2905
Reservation code: 1GN
www.americashouston.hilton.com

Travel Grants
Travel grants to attend GEC15 are available for students and professors who want to learn how to use GENI. If you are interested, see the Travel Grant Application Instructions – applying is easy and quick. Why not apply with a friend and learn together?

Host a Conference
If you are interested in hosting a future conference, visit the GEC Hosting Requirements page for more information.

GENI’s spiral development is a collaborative effort between the development community that is building GENI and the research community that is using GENI for experiments. The current phase of GENI, spiral four, dramatically increases the pace of experimenter participation.

Key new capabilities: The GENI development community has supported the goal of ramping up experimentation by focusing on a number of key experimenter needs over the past year.

• Continued integration of control frameworks and aggregates, with many aggregates available for regular use by experimenters.
• Interoperation of multiple types of GENI resources using a single API, enabling end-to-end slices across a wide range of technologies.
• Instrumentation and measurement (I&M) tools ready for use by experimenters.

Additional training options: During this same time period, GENI experimenters have has access to more training opportunities. GENI Engineering Conferences (GECs) continue to be a popular training venue. In June, the first GENI summer camp was held at Rochester Institute of Technology. The campers have learned GENI technologies and GENI tools, including FLACK, Instools, OpenFlow, GUSH, and PrimoGENI. “I am so pleased to say that 18 campers that took the survey have rated this event either above average or excellent. This really attests how far along GENI has come.” said Kaiqi Xiong of University of Rochester. “The GENI summer camp has been incredibly successful in ramping up students to use GENI for pursuing interesting research. What they learned in five days would have taken at least a semester (if not more). I believe the success builds on three indispensable aspects: getting students into teams in a room, hands on tutorials allowing them stand up GENI resources and reuse after they return to campus, and challenging them to create projects with their own ideas. The cross seeding of ideas and experiences was truly valuable.” said Kuang-Ching Wang of Clemson.  In July, over one hundred participants attended tutorials at GEC14 in Boston. This summer also saw the first GENI tutorials at non-GENI conferences, including SIGMETRICS and TridentCom.

Figure 1: GENI Summer Camp Students and Faculty

More experiments: The combination of more capable and mature frameworks and aggregates, extended training opportunities, better-developed lifecycle support, and improved interoperability has enabled more experimenters to incorporate GENI into their research. “We were very impressed by the wide range of projects that the participants were considering to use the GENI infrastructure to run experiments. As the GENI deployment increases, infrastructure becomes more mature and more services become available, GENI will have a much greater impact on network research.” said Zongming Fe of University of Kentucky.

Figure 2: Growth in ProtoGENI Users Since GEC4 (March 2009)

Figure 3: Growth in ProtoGENI Sliver Creation Since GEC4 (March 2009)

Learn more: To learn more and get started using GENI in your experiments

• Visit the new experimenter welcome page.
• Contact the GENI Help team at help@geni.net.
• Attend a GEC. The next GEC is in Houston, TX, October 23-25. A limited number of travel grants are available for US academics.

GENI WiMAX site build-outs are creating an open, programmable, GENI-enabled “4G-like” infrastructure at 11 major research university campuses.  Experimenters have started to use this infrastructure for both local and remote experiments, and tutorials are being provided to train future experimenters.  More information is available on the GENI wiki for WiMAX meso-scale deployments.  The design and deployment of GENI WiMAX technology is being led by Rutgers WINLAB.

GENI WiMAX Infrastructure

GENI-enabled WiMAX base stations installed on 8 (soon to be 11) campuses provide network researchers with “4G-like” services and wide-area coverage.  They operate on the 2.5GHz Educational Broadband Services band using experimental licenses issued by the FCC, and cooperate with Clearwire to avoid interference with their commercial services that utilize the same band.

See Figure 1 for the location of the existing and new campus sites.  Several sites are equipped with fixed “mobile stations” to support remote experimenters, and some sites provide WiFi service to allow “dual-homing” experiments.  One site (Rutgers WINLAB) uses an RF attenuator to connect a “mobile station” to a base station, and thus allow experiments with “over-the-air” wireless protocol parameters that could otherwise violate FCC rules.

Some sites feature installations with multiple base stations and antenna sectors, and are intended for mobility experiments that typically involve vehicular applications.

Figure 1. GENI WiMAX Campus Sites

Tutorials to Train WiMAX Experimenters

PI Thanasis Korakis and researcher Fraida Fund from the GENI WiMAX project at NYU Poly have taken the lead in developing WiMAX tutorials, designed to teach GENI researchers how to conduct productive WiMAX experiments.  Together with Ivan Seskar from Rutgers WINLAB and Manu Gosain from BBN Technologies, they have presented WiMAX tutorials at GEC13, TridentCom 2012 and GEC14.   Students at these tutorials conducted remote experiments on the open and programmable WiMAX testbeds at NYU Poly, Rutgers WINLAB and BBN Technologies.  Some experiments used a combination of available WiMAX and WiFi resources.  Some experiments spanned multiple sites, which were connected by a mesh of L2 VLAN connections setup through the GENI core network.

At the GEC14 tutorial, students were gathered into small groups, each led by one instructor, to setup and conduct a challenging and illustrative experiment.  For example, one group evaluated the implementation of a cooperative recovery protocol in a heterogeneous network situation, where a live feed is streamed at a high rate over the primary (WiMAX) network, and clients form a secondary (WiFi) network to recover lost packets from each other;  a high-level view of the configuration is shown in Figure 2.  See poster and slides for more details on this experiment.

If you want to learn more about using GENI WiMAX resources in your experiment, see the posted descriptions of WiMAX experiments, demos and tutorials, check the guide for WiMAX experimenter support, send a note to the WiMAX experimenters mailing list and/or sign up for a WiMAX tutorial when it is announced on the tutorial list.

Figure 2. WiMAX Broadcast Network with WiFi Networking Among Clients