NGN Concertation Meeting at 13th of February in Brussels
At the first speak the IESG chair presentated an IETF overview about the current work of the IETF. One main topic of the Internet Society is IP version 6. We need IPv6 for a point-to-point communication independent from the service providers! The Internet is content-driven today.; That's not useful in many cases. The Internet society is open for any organisation. The Internet will change in the near future to a professional platform for new applications and services. The routing tables are growing very fast - also therefore we need traffic engineering in the core network and IPv6. Furthermore, we need only one Internet, not different networks. Therefore, we need one routing domain, one domain name service and one management framework. Only approx. 10.000 people world-wide understand how the Internet really works. The Internet will be more complex in the future as now. Problems still exist to define policies for security, management, and QoS.
Afterwards the NGN Roadmap 2002 was presented by Sathya Rao from Telscom. The main topics here were quality of service (QoS) and mobility. Difficulties are available by the different parts of the network and different knowledge. Furthermore networks are not built for open developments. Technologies doesn't stand still. Competition between different manufactures, multiple network, and service provider are available.NGN for gather together the global experts in the field of networks. NGN provides the opportunity for discussion for developing new approaches for NGN. IST members and NGN members want to create new draft standards. The working groups from NGNI are:
NGN is driven mainly by requirements for faster networks to run new services (or make old services better). New technologies for the part of the network where the importance is high. The convergence will be focused on network layer, and for seamless service delivery.
After this introduction of NGNI the roadmap for optical topics was presented. Photonics enabling Ambient Intelligence. Further topics were:
Another main topic is the global network layer:
Data and voice integration over DWDM (IST-Projekt DAVID) is one of a couple of projects which combine applications or traffic forwarding with optical stuff.
The Wireless network roadmap was a further topic of this meeting. Here exits different development in the countries. For example, Japan is carrier-driven like NTT DoCoMo. On the other hand Europe and USA are standard-driven as you see at HSCSD, GPRS, EDGE, and UMTS. Furthermore it exists a terminal diversity between laptops, mobile phones, PDA etc. Higher data rate are necessary for new services, but will be approx. 2 Mbps enough? It will be in any case an IP-based technology platform for inter-working, convergence, and easy service implementation. Multipoint Multichannel Distribution System (MMDS) is a wideband DSL with a spectrum of 2.1; 2.3; and 2.5 GHz as one example for fixed/wireless integration. The GPRS area will grow very fast, because of the SMS/MMS application. In the year 2005: 350 Mio. mobile users exist, but only 32 Mio. user needs UMTS! What will be the future at 4G development: 4G = WLAN?
The Management Working Group in NGNI has seen the following trends:
The management software evolution are:
Afterwards the project MANTRIP was presented. MANTRIP will develop MA-based applications for configuration and auditing of QoS/SLAs parameters (jitter, delay, loss, bandwidth). Increase of performance of management applications by considering mechanisms for MAs migration is one goal. Additionally there will be supported an innovative fault management, QoS based on the DiffServ approach, and integration of mobile agents. The project will bring together issues on classical network management models and protocols (SNMP, CMIP) the ubiquitous IP, networking technologies (e.g. xDSL, MPLS) and mobile agents, so as to meet growing customers demands for QoS and reliability.
The QoS Working Group in NGNI presented the QoS progress. They divided the QoS topic into the following issues:
The QoS activities in this group are:
The focus of this working group is to find solutions which are relevant to the IPv6-level QoS issues, standardisation, benchmarking and technology roadmap generation.
The New Services Working Group in NGNI presented its view of their work. The requirements of the user lead to transparent service discovery and provision on integrated networks from their point of view. That enables the location of physically local services rather than virtually local services. This lead also to developing distributed algorithms for service discovery. The personalisation issues and integration of user profiling and positioning system technology in service discovery mechanisms is also a very big point. Therefore the service interoperability requirements are based on IP protocol suite for convergence, independent of the underlying layer 2 protocols, and mapping between different layers/protocols. Additionally IPv6 for multimedia communications directlyis necessary. But that is transparency for the users/customer. The roaming and handoffs in one Integrated Platform is also needed.
The main needs were found out:
After the presentations a discussion started across the different topics. For example: Wireless LAN is an private network and UMTS is an public network: how can be the inter-working between them.
The main topics are:
All IST projects should give remarks for a roadmap regarding the published deliverables (visions and contributions). Other questions were: How can the IST projects help to complete the NGN roadmap, and how can NGNI members implement the results of the projects? The new focus of the European Commission isn't anymore the founding of small projects in the future. Only big topics will supported which will not address the problems - which will address results and solutions. Therefore big discussion groups which includes experts from different business areas to solve current problems and deploy it into the market. The information should be targeting and maybe include different scenarios to get the input what are the problems/what should be solved.