Our group applied to participate in the “International IPv6 Application Contest 2011″ held by the German IPv6 Council. According to the official page of the Council: “The objectives of this contest are the generation of ideas and applications, which help determine how to introduce IPv6, the Internet of the next generation, on a large scale and use it effectively. The contest also provides an opportunity for the next generation of application developers to gain experience with IPv6.” In accordance with the motto of the contest: “Online on the Road – the new IPv6 Standard as driving forces for mobile communication”, our group submitted a Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) implementation for constrained devices, using the 6LoWPAN adaptation layer for IEEE 802.15.4 wireless links. The implementation carries SNMP messages over UDP/IPv6.
The SNMP implementation was wrapped with a number of components to produce a WattsApp telemetry platform. The platform demonstrates remote monitoring of sensor readings. It consists of a hardware interface to read data from S0 metering interfaces that is connected to an exporter running Contiki SNMP. A data collector is collecting meter readings and interfacing to a cloud server. The cloud server provides user authentication (via Facebook) and interfaces with a web front end as well as an Android application. All components of the Contiki SNMP telemetry application communicate via IPv6. The platform allows for easy integration of collected data into Facebook, therefore fostering a discussion on efficient energy usage, saving techniques and spreading the awareness of power consumption by different appliances in everyday life. The platform extends to many other fields of everyday activities like sports, leisure, appliances and utilities monitoring, making monitoring of “things around us” more social.
The implementation was possible due to the efforts of Advanced Distributed Systems Lab students, CNDS group members and several external affiliates.
This image shows how the CNDS web pages look like when the content is rendered as a word cloud. This form of “cloud computing” seems to be visually most attractive and it is quite some fun as well.
We used http://wordcloud.pagemon.net/ to generate the word cloud image. You can try this online tool easily yourself on other web sites of your personal interest. We found this tool entertaining for a while.
Yesterday, on June 8th, we enjoyed the World IPv6 Day. Here is how the IPv6 traffic changed during the day (measured on the tunnel connecting Jacobs’ IPv6 network to the German research network). Apparently, some very popular web sites like Google and Facebook turned off IPv6 right after the day again. This is probably not so good news…
For comparison purposes, here is a plot showing all traffic (IPv4 and IPv6) going in and out of Jacobs University around the World IPv6 Day. This plot seems to indicate that we carried a significant portion of our traffic over IPv6 during the World IPv6 Day. Note that the event took place when most of our undergraduate students had already left our campus.
The plot on the right shows the longer term impact of the IPv6 day. While some sites apparently turned off IPv6 support once the event was over, there is also good news since our IPv6 traffic remains at significantly higher levels. Obviously some sites used by our users left IPv6 turned on. We will try to keep an eye on this to see whether this is stable over longer terms or increases or decreases over time.
Some of us attended the 80th IETF meeting in Prague and we used the opportunity to demonstrate the NETCONF protocol running on AVR Raven motes (so called class 1 devices). Of course, these devices only support a subset of NETCONF, which we call NETCONF Light. Our goal was to prove that it is possible to implement a workable subset of NETCONF even on very resource constrained devices. On more powerful motes, such as Econotag motes, it should be possible to run an almost complete NETCONF stack.
Iyad Tumar submitted his PhD thesis a few weeks ago and today was the day of the defense of his thesis. Iyad managed to survive the intense hours of presentation and discussion. It seems the summer is a good period for getting a PhD degree at Jacobs.
Nikolay Melnikov presented a paper co-authored by Kaloyan Kanev discussing an implementation of our stream-based IP flow record query language. The paper received the AIMS 2010 best paper award.
Anuj Sehgal presented a poster discussing the effects of climate change and anthropogenic ocean acidification on underwater acoustic communications at IEEE Oceans in Sydney and his poster did win the second position in the student poster competition.
This Saturday, the running enthusiasts of the Computer Networks and Distributed Systems group did join the first running competition in 2010, the Vegesacker Citylauf. Our goal was to find out where we stand after the long winter and how we cope with a slightly more challenging trail (four times uphill and downhill). Overall we did pretty well, several minutes of improvement for some of us on the 10km distance!
