The first GENI Network Innovators Community Event (NICE) was held on November 10, 2015 in San Francisco. This event, held in conjunction with the International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP), attracted over 100 participants from inside and outside the GENI community. The event featured presentations and demonstrations by researchers and educators on their use of GENI. Topics covered included cellular wireless deployments in GENI; experiences using GENI in the classroom; and future Internet architectures, cloud computing and software defined networking research on GENI.
Figure 1. A lighter moment at GENI NICE.
Brighten Godfrey of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign delivered the keynote titled Five Years of Research on GENI: From the Future Internet Back to the Present. He described how over the last five years his research group has used GENI to enable a breadth of experiments spanning future Internet architecture, a new design for consistently high performance data transport, and network verification.
The GENI LTE update and transition session showcased the exciting projects underway as GENI transitions 4G cellular capabilities from WiMAX to LTE. The technology upgrade timeline and GENI Rack integration plans were presented to the community. Kettering University and Clemson University talked about their respective proposed connected vehicle and public safety application projects using the LTE deployments. University of Utah showcased its PhantomNet testbed that allows proof of concept indoor deployments of LTE networks.
The session on Testbed Supported Education and Curriculum featured five talks by instructors on their experiences using GENI in their classes and three by people developing GENI-based courseware. All five instructors have used GENI in multiple classes over the last few years. They all spoke of the educational benefits of the hands-on laboratory exercises assigned to their students and appreciated having a growing library of reusable lab modules that are coordinated with established textbooks and curricula. Several educators also emphasized stability, availability of resources, and system monitoring as central concerns.
At the Future Internet and Distributed cloud session, experimenters and testbed providers presented recent progress. They talked about federation status, research plans and key GENI features that enable innovative deployments. The session included 4 demonstrations that showcased SDN’s ability to support advanced services and architectures, as well as the benefits of federation and dynamic cyber-infrastructure that extend beyond the computer science community into other domain sciences.
Figure 2. Brighten Godfrey delivers the keynote address at GENI NICE.
Concurrent with GENI NICE was the ICNP CoolSDN workshop. The two workshops organized a joint panel discussion on the Innovative uses of SDN in Research Cyberinfrastructure. The panel, moderated by Mark Berman, consisted of Jun Bi (Tsinghua University), Deniz Gurkhan (University of Houston), Tom Lehman (Univeristy of Maryland) and Alex Sprintson (Texas A&M University). Jun talked about the SDN-based Future Internet Testbed Project (FINE) in China; Deniz described her SDNTrace tool for protocol design and testing in SDN networks; Tom reported on a Software Defined Exchange (SDX) at the MAX Regional network; and Alex spoke on the possibilities and challenges related to implementing network coding in software defined networks. The discussions that followed the presentations ranged from the opportunities opened up by SDNs to how SDN technology may evolve with an emphasis on raising the level abstraction seen by applications.
Figure 3. Joint panel with CoolSDN.
GENI NICE included a demonstrations and posters session held at the ICNP Welcome Reception. 14 demo and 11 poster teams took this opportunity to showcase their work to the broader ICNP community in addition to those at GENI NICE. At the start of the session, each team made a 30-second presentation on their work so attendees could prioritize the demos or posters they wanted to see.
Figure 4. Xenia Mountrouidou describes her work on DDoS Flooding Detection and Containment using SDN at the ICNP Welcome Reception/NICE Demo session.
For a complete event agenda and for material presented at the workshop, see http://www.geni.net/nice2015.