SearchReport from Tridentcom 2010
From 18 to 20 May 2010, Berlin was the focal point of the community working on testbeds and experimental infrastructures. Berlin hosted and welcomed the 6th International Conference on Testbeds and Research Infrastructures for the Development of Networks and Communities, better known as TridentCom 2010.
More than 130 experts attended the conference that provided a forum to explore existing and planned testbed concepts, infrastructures, and tools for addressing the research and business challenges of ICT convergence. The technical programme represented a snapshot of the best of breed of international research on testbeds and research infrastructures conducted in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Australia. The strong technical programme during the three days brought together researchers from across the world that presented and discussed their latest results. Out of more than 100 submitted contributions the programme committee finally selected after a peer review process 15 full papers, 26 practices papers and 22 posters. Overall the presented contributions originate from 22 nations underlining the world-wide scope and significance of the conference.
Welcome and keynotes
Prof. Thomas Magedanz from Fraunhofer FOKUS and Technical University Berlin, who acted as the general chair, opened the conference by pointing out that the research and development in the areas of converging networks, unified communications, as well as emerging cross-sector smart applications is getting increasingly complex and expensive. For this reason open testbeds and research infrastructures are becoming the enabling infrastructure for achieving innovations in various domains, ranging from networking and services up to various application domains.
In the first keynote session, Dr. Max Lemke from the European Commission presented the European view on the role of experimentation in future Internet research. He gave also an outlook on the future activities in this area that are subsumed under the Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE) Initiative. Chip Elliott from the GENI project office presented the approach taken in the US towards exploring networks of the future. He presented the current status and plans of GENI (Global Environment for Network Innovations) as well as the programme activities of the GENI project office. Prof. Phuoc Tran-Gia from the University of Würzburg presented in his keynote the concept and federation issues of the G-Lab project, a large German initiative to deploy testbeds and experimental platforms in Germany.
In the second keynote session, Prof. Akihiro Nakao from the University of Tokyo presented the relevant activities in Japan towards the design and development of testbeds for the future Internet. He devoted particular attention to infrastructures that support virtualisation as one of the fundamental concepts in the area. Finally, Bernard Barani from the European Commission presented the European Public Private Partnership on the Future Internet (PPP-FI). The PPP-FI implicitly had a strong influence on the conference, as it represents a significant effort to demonstrate future Internet services and applications.
Technical sessions
With the emergence of the future Internet, including the network of the future, the Internet of things, and the Internet of services, the traditional borders of network and service layers are vanishing. Cross-layer experimental platforms are being established around the globe to enable rapid prototyping and validation of innovative ideas but also taking into account migration and interworking with existing network and service platforms. Thus, this year’s Tridentcom emphasised Testbeds and Experimental Facilities for the Future Internet and also featured additional testbed highlights from other domains. The accepted contributions resulted in 11 technical sessions, addressing:
- Federated and large-scale testbeds
- Future Internet testbeds
- Future wireless testbeds
- Monitoring in large scale testbeds
- Network and resource virtualisation for future Internet research
- Future Internet testbeds for wireless sensors, media and mobility
- Wireless and mobile networking testbeds
- Monitoring, QoS and application instrumentation in large scale testbeds
- Management, provisioning and tools for future network testbeds
- Experimentally driven research and user experience testbeds
The conference programme also featured an interactive panel and three tutorials. TridentCom 2010 was also the site of the second focused workshop on Open NGN and IMS Testbeds (ONIT).
Conclusion
The TridentCom conference “brand” is now established as the main yearly conference of the research and development community for testbeds and experimental infrastructures. The 6th conference this year impressively demonstrated that the community is very active and is taking up the challenge to deploy the necessary infrastructure for supporting future Internet and future network research.
The conference concluded with the announcement that the next conference, the 7th TridentCom 2011, will take place in Shanghai, the flourishing centre of commerce, finance and business of China, organised by the Chinese National Engineering Research Center for Broadband Networks and Applications.
Further information is available at www.tridentcom.org