GAIA & Alternative Networks

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Presenter: Jose Saldana (jsaldana@unizar.es)

Tutorial IETFBogotá, 28 Sep2015

Scheme of this presentation

What is GAIA? What is the IRTF?

What things are being discussed in the list/meetings?

Two examples from the last GAIA meeting (IETF93, Prague) Alternative Networks draft

Simplemux draft

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What is GAIA?What is the IRTF?

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What is GAIA?

The Global Access to the Internet for All (GAIA) is an IRTF initiative that aims*

(1) to create increased visibility and interest among the wider community on the challenges and opportunities in enabling global Internet access, in terms of technology as well as the social and economic drivers for its adoption;

(2) to create a shared vision among practitioners, researchers, corporations, non governmental and governmental organisations on the challenges and opportunities;

(3) to articulate and foster collaboration among them to address the diverse Internet access and architectural challenges (including security, privacy, censorship and energy efficiency);

(4) to document and share deployment experiences and research results to the wider community through scholarly publications, white papers, presentations, workshops, Informational and Experimental RFCs;

(5) to document the costs of existing Internet Access, the breakdown of those costs (energy, manpower, licenses, bandwidth, infrastructure, transit, peering), and outline a path to achieve a 10x reduction in Internet Access costs especially in geographies and populations with low penetration.

(6) to develop a longer term perspective on the impact of GAIA research group findings on the standardisation efforts at the IETF. This could include recommendations to protocol designers and architects.

28/09/2015 4* IRTF GAIA charter, http://datatracker.ietf.org/rg/gaia/charter/

What is GAIA? What is the IRTF?

GAIA: is an IRTF Working Group, chartered on 2014-10-15.

What is the IRTF? (https://irtf.org/)

The Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) promotes research of importance to the evolution of the Internet by creating focused, long-term Research Groups working on topics related to Internet protocols, applications, architecture and technology.

The Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) focuses on longer term research issues related to the Internet while the parallel organization, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), focuses on the shorter term issues of engineering and standards making.

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What is GAIA? What is the IRTF?

9 IRTF research groups are currently chartered:

cfrg, Crypto Forum RG

dtnrg, Delay-Tolerant Networking RG

gaia, Global Access to the Internet for All RG

iccrg, Internet Congestion Control RG

icnrg, Information-Centric Networking RG

nfvrg, Network Function Virtualization RG

nmrg, Network Management RG

nwcrg, Network Coding RG

sdnrg, Software-Defined Networking RG

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What is GAIA? What is the IRTF?

Management

IRTF is managed by the IRTF Chair in consultation with the Internet Research Steering Group (IRSG).

The IRSG membership includes:

the IRTF Chair

the chairs of the various Research Groups

other individuals (“members at large”) from the research community selected by the IRTF Chair.

The detailed IRTF Research Group guidelines and procedures are described in RFC 2014.

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What is GAIA?

Extract from: http://www.internetsociety.org/publications/ietf-journal-july-2014/researching-global-access-internet-for-all-gaia

(…) today’s Internet represents a critical infrastructure enabling remote health care, education, employment, e-governance, digital economy, social networks, and more.

(…) Internet access should be universal in terms of availability and ability to contribute to the wider community (…).

Although this vision is shared among both major stakeholders and global governments, the reality of today’s Internet and its level of digital inclusion is confronted by a growing digital divide (…).

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What things are being discussed in the list/meetings?

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What things are being discussed in the list/meetings?

GAIA meetings:

1st IRTF GAIA workshop: IETF 89 meeting. London (Mar 2014)

2nd GAIA workshop: Cambridge Computer Lab (Oct 2014)

3rd GAIA workshop: co-located with ACM DEV 5 (Dec 2014) San Jose, California

GAIA RG meeting: IETF93 meeting. Prague (Jul 2015)

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What things are being discussed in the list/meetings?

Deployment experiences

Architectures

Future Internet Architectures

Research project experiences

Related news

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What things are being discussed in the list/meetings?Deployment experiences

IXP Deployment Experiences in Africa - Michuki Mwangi, ISOC

Internet Deployment Experiences from NSRC - Steve Huter & Hervey Allen, NSRC

Shaddi Hassan (TIER/UCB) - GSM Whitespaces: SpectrumSharing for Community Cellular Networks

Marco Zennaro (ICTP) - TV White Space and ICTD

Bruce Baikie (Inveneo) - Rural Broadband in DevelopingRegions - A shared backbone approach in Haiti to provideconnections in 20% of the rural areas

Ranga Krishna (EFF) - Open Wireless Movement

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What things are being discussed in the list/meetings?Architectures

Joerg Ott (Aalto) - Managing Dynamic Content in Challenged Networks

Nishanth Sastry (KCL) - Why the developing world needs a load of caches

Yan Shvartzshnaider (Cambridge)/Max Ott (NICTA) - The Economics of Time Elasticity: A case for a new mobile network service

Ioannis Psaras (UCL) - Information Exposure through Named Content and implications to Disaster Management

Less-than-Best-Effort Service for Community Wireless Networks: Challenges at Three Layers - Michael Welzl, University of Oslo

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What things are being discussed in the list/meetings?Research projects

Internet Access Requirements: a view from the IU-‐ATC project - Saleem Bhatti, University of St. Andrews

Liberouter - Towards Do-It-Yourself Networking - Joerg Ott, Aalto University

Virtual Public Networks - Panagiotis Papadimitriou, University of Hannover

Funkfeur.at and Community Wireless Networks, AaronKaplan, Funkfeuer

TVWS Challenges and Experiences

Rural PAWS

Citizen Community Clouds in Guifi.net

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What things are being discussed in the list/meetings?

Related news (mainly in the list)

See https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/search/?email_list=gaia

Some examples:

Samsung wants to deliver the internet via thousands of satellites

update on Google balloons

Obama's new public housing internet program

Google public wifi

Cheap Satellite Receiver Offers a Free Way to Access Wikipedia

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Two examples from the last GAIA meeting (IETF93, Prague)• Alternative Networks draft• Simplemux draft

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Two examples from the last GAIA meeting (IETF93, Prague)• Alternative Networks draft• Simplemux draft

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Alternative Networks draft

Currently the first (and only) GAIA document in the IRTF stream: http://datatracker.ietf.org/stream/irtf/

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Alternative Networks draft

What are the objectives and the contribution of the draft?

To propose a classification, and therefore a set of shared terms and definitions to be used in future documents (developed by GAIA or other groups). Avoid using the same term for different things

Survey of references where more information and experiences can be found (13 normative and 40 informative references) Protocols, technologies, etc. used in Alternative networks

Structure these networks follow

Examples of real deployments Overview of initiatives, technologies and approaches employed in these

networks

Information about certain projects promoting an Alternative Network, etc.

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Structure of the draft (more details in next slides)1. Introduction

1.1. Traditional networks

1.2. Criteria for the classification of Alternative Networks

2. Classification of Alternative Networks

2.1. Community Networks

2.2. Wireless Internet Service Providers WISPs

2.3. Shared infrastructure model

2.4. Crowdshared approaches, led by the people and third party stakeholders

2.5. Testbeds for research purposes

3. Scenarios where Alternative Networks are deployed

3.1. Digital Divide and Alternative Networks

3.2. Urban vs. rural areas

3.3. Gap between demanded and provided communications services

3.4. Topology patterns followed by Alternative Networks

4. Technologies employed

4.1. Wired

4.2. Wireless

5. Upper layers

5.1. Layer 3

5.2. Transport layer

5.3. Services provided28/09/2015 20

1. Introduction. 1.1 Definition

Definition of “Traditional Network” - Regarding scale, they are usually large networks spanning entire regions.

- Top-down control of the network and centralizedapproaches are used.

- They require a substantial investment in infrastructure.

- Users in traditional networks tend to be passive consumers, as opposed to active stakeholders, in the network design, deployment, operation and maintenance.

Alternative Network DeploymentsThis term includes a set of network access models that have emerged in the last decade with the aim of bringing Internet connectivity to people, following topological, architectural and business models different from the so-called "traditional" ones, where a company deploys the infrastructure connecting the users, who pay a subscription fee to be connected and make use of it.

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1. Introduction. 1.2 Classification criteria

Commercial model / promoter a community of users, a public stakeholder, a company, etc.

Goals and motivation reducing capital expenditures, reducing operational costs, extending coverage to underserved areas, etc.

Administrative modelcentralized or distributed.

Technologies employed

Typical scenariosurban, rural, developing countries, etc.

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2. Classification. 2.1 Community Networks

(…) large-scale, distributed, self-managed networks sharing these characteristics:

- They are built and organized in a decentralized and open manner.

- They start and grow organically, they are open to participation from everyone, sometimes sharing an open peering agreement. Community members directly contribute active (not just passive) network infrastructure.

- Knowledge about building and maintaining the network and ownership of the network itself is decentralized and open. Community members have an obvious and direct form of organizational control over the overall operation of the network in their community (not just their own participation in the network).

- The network can serve as a backhaul for providing a whole range of services and applications, from completely free to even commercial services.

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2. Classification.

2.2 Wireless Internet Service Providers

WISPs are commercially-operated wireless Internet networks that provide Internet and/or Voice Over Internet (VoIP) services. They are most common in areas not covered by (…) telcosor ISPs.

2.3 Shared infrastructure modelWhen users already own a deployed infrastructure, either individually or as a community, sharing that infrastructure with an operator represents an interesting win-win solution that starts to be exploited in some contexts.

Example: (…) deployment of 3G services in rural areas in which there is a broadband rural community network.

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2. Classification.

2.4 Crowdshared approaches, led by the people and third party stakeholders

the home router creates two wireless networks:

one of them is normally used by the owner, and

the other one is public. A small fraction of

the bandwidth is allocated to the public

network.

Examples: City councils, companies, big operators

2.5 Testbeds for research purposesthe initiative to start the network is not from

the community, but from a research entity (e.g.

a university), with the aim of using it for

research purposes (…).

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3. Scenarios

3.1. Digital Divide and Alternative Networks

- Definition of “Developing Country” and “Digital Divide”.

- Efforts from governments and international organizations focused initially on improving and extending the existing infrastructure in order not to leave their population behind.

3.2. Urban vs. rural areas

- Leveraging on existing Alternative Networks for improving coverage

3.3. Gap between demanded and provided

communications services

- When the market fails to provide the demanded services, citizens may be compelled to take a more active part in their design and implementation

3.4. Topology patterns followed by Alternative

Networks

- Growth patterns

- Length of the links

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4. Technologies employed

One – three paragraphs summarizing each section, as long as it is related to Alternative Networks. References about technologies, protocols, etc.

4.1. Wired

4.2. Wireless

4.2.1. Antennas

4.2.2. Physical link length

4.2.2.1. Line-of-Sight

4.2.2.2. Transmitted and Received Power

4.2.3. MAC Protocols for Wireless Links

4.2.3.1. 802.11 (Wi-Fi)

4.2.3.2. GSM

4.2.3.3. Dynamic Spectrum

4.2.3.3.1. 802.11af

4.2.3.3.2. 802.22

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5. Upper layers

One – three paragraphs summarizing each section, as long as it is related to Alternative Networks. References about protocols, research papers, etc.

5.1. Layer 3

5.1.1. IP addressing

5.1.2. Routing protocols

5.1.2.1. Traditional routing protocols

5.1.2.2. Mesh routing protocols

5.2. Transport layer

5.2.1. Traffic Management when sharing network resources

5.2.2. Multi-hop issues

5.3. Services provided

5.3.1. Intranet services

5.3.2. Access to the Internet

5.3.2.1. Web browsing proxies

5.3.2.2. Use of VPNs28/09/2015 28

Two examples from the last GAIA meeting (IETF93, Prague)• Alternative Networks draft• Simplemux draft

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• Tunnel of multiplexed packets• Different tunneling and multiplexed protocols allowed

Presentation:http://www.slideshare.net/josemariasaldana/simplemux-a-generic-multiplexing-protocol

Implementation of Simplemux+ROHC over IPv4 available at:https://github.com/TCM-TF/simplemux

45% bandwidth savings for VoIP over RTP

Simplemux separator (1-3 bytes)

Tunneling header

Muxed protocol header

Protocol=

Simplemux Protocol=any

Simplemux: a Generic Multiplexing Protocolhttp://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-saldana-tsvwg-simplemux/

¡Muchas gracias!Thanks!

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This work has been partially funded by the EU H2020 Wi-5 project (Grant Agreement no: 644262).

Q&A