Jürgen Schönwälder's Home Page and Weblog

I have just enjoyed reading a paper where the author reports about a number of measurements he did and draws very clear 'opinionated' conclusions from the facts presented in the paper. This was such a refreshing read and I started to wonder why I found this so refreshing. It turns out that most networking papers I read (or have to read) either have lots of opinion but only a very few facts to support them or the papers have lots of facts but the authors refrain from articulating a clear conclusion and a clear opinion from the facts.

I find well argued 'opinionated networking research papers' much more fun to read and it is kind of a shame that most authors these days either shy away from formulating a clear opinion based on the facts they have observed or simply have an opinion without showing any effort to collect facts supporting their opinion. Perhaps the way our research world is organized simply does not encourage authors to write 'opinionated' research papers. Authors may fear that it is more difficult to get an opinionated paper accepted for publication due to what essentially is a lack of trust in the review system. Perhaps I should consider starting a Journal of Opinionated Networking Research where it is explicitly stated that it will not publish any papers having opinion but lacking supporting facts or papers having facts but lacking an opinion. I am relatively sure there will be quite some readers who will enjoy reading opinionated research papers. The problem might be to find a sufficient number of authors who understand the art of writing well opinionated networking research papers and who are not afraid of doing it.

At the 81st IETF in Quebec, a new working group was formed to work on standards for home networks. During the kickoff meeting, a number of talks were delivered depicting a future where homes have an integrated network infrastructure comprising of several sub-networks (IPv6 of course ;-) interconnected by several routers and supported by multiple uplinks. Furthermore, a number of firewalls will be present to provide separation between the office network, the entertainment network, the kid's network, the utility network, the home automation network, the health monitoring network, etc.

While I am sure that some networking geeks will have such integrated home networks (and apparently some IESG members already enjoy building networks like this), I have some doubts that such highly integrated home networks will become the norm, for simple operational reasons: My utility provider likely does not want to answer support questions that turn out to be a problem in my integrated home network. Similarly, my TV provider likely does not want to deal with issues caused by my game playing kids and improper configuration of network separation (as kids grow up, they might also start playing games with my internal routing protocol). And surely, the organization I am working for wants to ensure proper protection of my home office and likely sees no reason to trust any of the elements of my home network.

I consider it much more likely that we will have a number of mostly isolated networks in the home of the future with relatively few shared elements. These mostly separate networks will run IP (not sure which version) and there is likely little direct communication between then. For example, I can imagine that my utility provider likes to access my meter via my ISP's connection to my home, but I assume that the joint infrastructure ends where the ISP's network enters my home. For example, the ISP might lease a VLAN to the utility provider and a separate utility network starts right at the point where the ISP network ends. But it might also be possible that the utility provider simply hooks in the meanwhile paid and thus cheap GSM network to read my meter, which is even less hassle to deploy and operate.

That said, lets see how the home networking activity proceeds in the IETF. Perhaps the working group manages to come up with solutions how to run an integrated home network in an autonomic way that does not need any management and reliably delivers the services demanded by the different applications.

The Universal Serial Bus (USB) has been a great success. Almost all peripheral devices such as printers, keyboards, cameras, audio devices, disk drives, wireless interfaces can be easily connected using a standard plug. And of course, USB memory sticks have become a standard way of data exchange, replacing CDs and DVDs. But exactly here is the problem. Some companies are rightfully afraid of leaking sensitive data and with the appearance of fast small USB memory sticks, the USB interface has been identified as a problem.

Together with a student, I recently visited a larger company and we carried some development boards with me. The micro-controllers on the boards are conveniently programmable via a USB interface. Unfortunately, the company has a policy that forbids anything with a USB plug to be carried out of the company (and we wanted to take some boards home again). And of course, for people sitting at the registration desk, all that matters is the USB plug form factor. We had to go through a special procedure in order to get an exception to carry our boards into the company. As part of the procedure, questions had to be answered such as whether the development boards can store data. Of course they can store data since you can reprogram the flash memory of the micro-controllers via the USB plug but for the sake of efficiency I said something that sounded like no to them. Once the boards were inside of the company, we faced the next hurdle since all USB ports of the computers were physically locked. This seems to be kind of a second defense line - even if you manage to bring in a USB device, you can't simply connect it. Luckily, there is a person with an impressive keyring and she was able to unlock a USB port so that we could connect a board before things got locked again. We thought we are ready to go now but there was a third defense line - the BIOS had all USB ports disabled and of course the BIOS was protected so that it could not be changed. So once again we had to call someone to establish an exception so we could start with out work. Needless to say, this all took several hours of time to get sorted out.

Today, an Internet-Draft (I-D) was posted with the goal to clarify how to cite Requests for Comments (RFCs). The suggested BiBTeX format is relatively close to what I happen to use for about 15 years. But the final word of course has not been spoken about this and there are some interesting questions one can ask. For example, since RFCs fail to represent author names properly (unless your parents were wise enough to give you a name that is 7-bit US ASCII compatible), the question arises whether a citation in publications that do allow the proper representation of names (almost all journals and conferences) MAY use a person's native spelling of his name or whether one MUST use the spelling in the published RFC.

A transition of the RFC format from 7-bit US ASCII to UTF-8 might be a solution to this problem (for all future RFCs), but then this might take even longer than the adoption of IPv6. ;-)

My first contact to the Internet was in the late 1980s (ftp.funet.fi was our big friend at that time). If someone back then would have told me that in 2010 I will be discussing math homework with my daughter over the Internet, with me being in China and she being at home in Germany, I likely would have called this person crazy. Boy, did the world change during the last 20+ years.

I have accepted an invitation to co-chair the NETMOD working group in the Operations and Management Area of the IETF. Almost exactly five years ago, I have been in a similar situation when I was asked to co-chair the ISMS working group in the Security Area of the IETF. I am still co-chairing ISMS - lets see how long my engagement with NETMOD is going to last...

The IETF has just opened a store where you can buy official IETF logo wear. This is an interesting new move towards IETF sponsorship since some of the money of each item goes to the IETF. I have no clue how much money this brings, but surely there are a few observations I like to share:

The shop, likely located in the UK, knows shipping rates to Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, the USA and of course worldwide. The currency menu allows me to choose between AUD, CAD, GBP, EUR and USD. Not sure how to interpret this, but perhaps worldwide equals Europe? Well, the shipping page says worldwide shipments are in USD - so I am not quite sure how to use the EUR option.

The wear only includes T-shirts, perhaps because it is still summer in the UK. But the IETF being a global organization, this is not the case everywhere. So I would expect to also find sweaters - and since the shop is located in the UK, they really ought to have IETF umbrellas. But anyway, the "I survived the train journey to Maastricht" specialty shirt has the potential to become a true classic. Concerning the coffee mugs, I wonder whether steins would not sell even better.

While uploading a paper today, I was directed to the new IEEE online copyright transfer site. To sign the electronic form, I had to type my name. The legal basis for this form of electronic signature was given as well:

By clicking this button, you certify that such action constitutes your electronic signature to the IEEE Copyright Form in accordance with Federal Law, which authorizes electronic signature by authenticated request from a user over the internet as a valid substitute for a written signature.

I am not sure which Federal Law they refer to, given the global nature of IEEE authors. Assuming they refer to a law in the United States of America, it perhaps even applies to someone or something able to type my name correctly. So the real question seems to be what constitutes an "authenticated request" in the sense of this Federal Law. Given the rather unspectacular web site user registration system and the rather simple minded mechanisms for password resets via unprotected email, I consider the level of authentication rather poor. Will be interesting to see whether these signatures hold in front of courts.

I had to go to Brussels for a project review and as usual I preferred to travel by train. When I left home, I checked my connection and the Internet told me the trains run on time. About an hour later, when I reached the main station in downtown Bremen, I learned that my train got cancelled. This meant an hour waiting time for the next train to arrive and plus the (usual) delay we accumulated during the trip to Cologne. I arrived about 1h30m late in Cologne. (I will file some papers and I should get ~7 Euro back for the delay, close to 5 Euro/hour - wow.) In Cologne, I got warned that there might be trouble with the trains running to Brussels the next day.

When I left Cologne, the train was on time and I arrived well in time of the meeting. The project review went very well and it was becoming clear that we finish early. So I went to the train website to check whether there are any earlier connections I could take with my ticket. This way, I learned that my train back to Cologne was cancelled. When I arrived at the main station in Brussels, I could change my ticket to use the Belgium high speed train running to Cologne. Luckily, the train that was scheduled to leave while I changed my ticket was 45 minutes late - so I could get something to eat and jump on the train. While on the train, we were told that the train does not go to Cologne and we were told that we have to leave the train in Aachen. Well, since I took an earlier train, I thought I still can be happy. When we arrived in Liege (thats before we reached Aachen), we were told that all passengers to Cologne should step over in Liege to another train running to Cologne, which was immediately following us. After stepping over and leaving Liege, we were told that the train has a technical problem and thus the train gets rerouted and will be a about 30 minutes late in Aachen, but it will then continue at normal speed to Cologne.

The bottom line is that I was happy to get on a train earlier than my scheduled train to Cologne. However, the rerouting and the problems with the train did eat up all the time benefit - so I finally arrived in Cologne at the time the cancelled train would have arrived in Cologne. The funny thing is that I can't really complain about anything since according to German regulations, you can only ask for refunds if you are at least one hour late. Since I arrived still on time, it does not matter that I spent several additional hours in various trains.

Jacobs University is establishing Research Centers in order to focus research activities and graduate education. During the past few month (well, the whole year to be more precise), I have been working on a proposal of a research center called the Center for Advanced Systems Engineering (CASE). The CASE research center is rooted in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science faculty but in addition integrates colleagues from Ocean Research and Logistics. The CASE research center proposal finally got officially approved and we are now working on filling the center with life in 2010. Expect more CASE related news to come.