Event Minutes

200 people from 29 nations attended the FOKUS IMS Workshop 2009

Some final words from the general chair to attendants and observers:

The 5th International FOKUS IMS Workshop this year labeled “Next Generation (Mobile) Networks and the Future Internet - Towards Rich Communications and Interactive Media” took place in Berlin, Germany on November 11 – 12, 2009. 200 people from 29 nations attended this year´s event, classifying it as one of the bigger events in regard to the global economical situation and growing H1N1 challenges.

Compared to the last years we extended the technical coverage area from Next Generation Networks (NGNs), integrative service architectures and open APIs, interactive Media and IPTV also towards the emerging Next Generation Mobile Networks and the related Evolved Packet Core (EPC). Also we added this year a dedicated Future Internet (FI) track in order to provide a mental pavement for the evolution from NGN and Next Generation Mobile Network to the Future Internet. Thus we ran on Wednesday four dedicated tutorials and subsequent workshops in parallel, all having roughly the same number of attendants.

Below you find some more information about the different tracks of this event.

Track 1 “Rich Communications and Telco 2.0” somehow represents the major pillar of this workshop series as this topic has been covered since the first workshop.

Tutorial 1: Open APIs and their Role in Emerging SOA SDPs for Converging Networks
This tutorial was attended by 50 delegates. The tutorial provided an overview of services principles, architectures, standards, services and service creation approaches and tools for telecommunications and the Internet.

Workshop 1: Facing the Technology Landscape beyond Voice
This workshop - chaired by Niklas Blum and Dr. Stephan Steglich - has been attended by 60 delegates. In two interactive sessions we looked at principles for open APIs and service environments in a converged Web/Telco service system from two perspectives: service platforms in the network (presentations by trommsdorff + drüner, OMA, Sunrise, BT, NTT, and DT Developer Garden) and client architectures (presentations by Bell Labs, TNO, T-Labs, Siruna, W3C, and OMTP). The major consensus was that opening of the telecommunications service domain does not only need to provide access to network-based functionality, but also to the end device’s resources. However successful business models for open network APIs are still unclear. This workshop was ended by a lively panel discussion between the audience and all the speakers.

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Track 2 “IPTV & Media Convergence” represents also a classic topic, which has been added since 2007 to the event´s scope.

Tutorial 2: Rich Media and Convergence
This tutorial 2 - given by Oliver Friedrich - was attended by around 30 participants from different professions. The tutorial gave a deep insight on the different topics driving the developments inside the current (IP)TV domain. This included standardization aspects as well as a look on already available commercial solutions as the Yahoo! Widget Channel, Microsoft Mediaroom and CE-HTML.

Workshop 2: IPTV & Media Convergence
This workshop - chaired by Dr. S. Arbanowski and Yun Chao Hu, OIPF chairman, Ericsson - has been attended by around 50 delegates. This year´s converged media services track of the FOKUS IMS Workshop did again address the challenges and opportunities for operators, vendors, content providers and advertising industry in a converged services world. Representatives from all these stakeholders namely Intel, Sony, Philips, IRT, Detecon, Mediengruppe RTL, Alcatel-Lucent, Google/YouTube, Microsoft, Novay, RTV Media Group, MMH, STC, and TNO expressed their views followed by committed discussions with and among the audience. HybridTV and 3-screen-strategies complemented by comprehensive cross-media activities have been agreed among the participants to be key market driver. Standards as defined by ETSI TISPAN and Open IPTV Forum will help to create, manage, find, recommend, distribute, and retrieve personalized rich media on a mass market scale.

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Track 3 “Future Internet” represented a new track, which was inspired at last year´s IMS conference as the final session.

Tutorial 3: Future Internet Technologies
The Future Internet tutorial held by Dr. Tanja Zseby, Dr. Michael Kleis and Jens Tiemann, provided an overview of Future Internet Technologies. Among the technologies presented was a short introduction to IPv6 and Locator Identifier Split solutions (HIP, LISP) followed by an introduction to currently discussed solutions for Network Virtualization, Functional Composition, Autonomic Communication, Content Centric Networks and Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs). The second part introduced P2P concepts, P2P and P4P Evolution and introduced how P2P technologies can help with deployment of Future Internet solutions. The third part covered methods to assess Future Internet solutions. In particular the assessment of novel cognitive features of future networks for self-management and self-protection require new methods to compare and evaluate different approaches.

Workshop 3: Future Internet - What Can we Use Today?
This workshop - chaired by Dr. Tanja Zseby - was attended by around 40 delegates. In her opening keynote Graca Carvalho (Cisco Systems, CTO consulting engineer) showed how demands from mobile networks and cloud computing put more and more pressure to today’s networks. In her talk she stressed the need for Future Internet technologies. Bernard Barani (EU commission, DG INFOS Converged Networks and Services) presented EU plans in the Future Internet area, especially for setting up a Public Private Partnership (PPP) in this field. Other highlights covered cognitive algorithms in future networks (Dr. Didier Colle, IBBT), and the offerings of federated experimental facilities for industrial customers (Gautier Harmel, UPMC, OneLab). The second part of the workshop under the motto “How FIT is your network?” was dedicated to the preparation of the first Future Internet Tournament 2010 (www.fit-2010.net). Jens Tiemann (Fraunhofer FOKUS) showed ways towards a “NET IQ test” to compare and assess self-management and self-protection features of future cognitive networks. RoboCup expert Dr. Hamid Moballegh (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany) showed how competitions can boost research in a particular area, encourage scientists to compare ideas and make complex scientific topics tangible to the public. The workshop was followed by an internal meeting of the technical core group for the tournament preparation.

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Track 4 “Next Generation Mobile Network & Evolved Packet Core (EPC)” was also new and motivated by the current hype around Long Term Evolution (LTE) and the corresponding emerging notion of Next Generation Mobile Networks.

Tutorial 4: Next Generation Mobile Network and Related Technologies - LTE, EPC and IMS
In this tutorial Prof. Dr. Thomas Magedanz (TU Berlin) introduced the terminology, key concepts and architectures, as well as the related 3GPP Evolved Packet System (EPS) standards. A major focal point was the Evolved Packet Core (EPC) and its relationship to IMS. At the end of this tutorial the FOKUS EPC team has shown for the first time an early prototype of its brand new OpenEPC (www.openepc.net) toolkit, which will be officially released in spring 2010.

Workshop 4: Next Generation Mobile Network – From Vision to Reality
This workshop - chaired by Hans Einsiedler (T-Labs), Prof. Dr. Thomas Magedanz (TU Berlin), and Prof. Dr. Hans Schotten (TU Kaiserslautern) - featured one session about “LTE and Interworking with other Access Network Technologies” and one session about “Potential Next Generation Mobile Network Applications Including Voice over EPC, Rich Media and Communications, as well as Rich Internet Applications”. Experts from research & industry, such as Fraunhofer HHI, Deutsche Telekom AG, Vodafone, University of Aveiro, mobilkom austria, Swisscom, SAP, presented their latest results and visions in both sessions. A subsequent operator panel addressed the key questions around voice over LTE and if there will be an LTE business case besides more capacity and efficiency. Surprisingly voice over LTE provision seems to be completely out of scope within the next years.

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Social event:

The social event on Wednesday evening was performed near FOKUS in the “Meilenwerk Berlin” - a former tram garage featuring today a garage for vintage cars and luxury cars. Here we also performed the first FOKUS (mini) golf challenge after dinner, allowing the “FOKUS family” to continue discussions and to come to know new friends.

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Conference:

The main conference entitled Rich Communications and Media Services above Smart Broadband Bitpipes and the Future Internet on Thursday aimed for uniting the different tracks and has attracted around 180 attendants. The first session “Open APIs for Rich Communications in Converged Networks” has discussed different approaches for opening up the network and/or end systems for converged service provision from the standards and operator perspectives.

Session two “Rich Media” compared emerging interactive IPTV standards and operator platforms with alternative approaches from the internet community providing gaming and targeted content.

The afternoon started with a technical keynote about “Preventing Congestion Collapse of SIP Servers” from Prof. Dr. Henning Schulzrinne from Columbia University, New York City, which was followed by a vendor panel discussion on “How to Get to NGN and how to Get from NGN to Future Internet?”.

The final session was devoted to the evolution of NGN towards the Future Internet by looking at Future Internet experimental platforms, the impacts of P2P and Cloud technologies onto NGNs, as well as how new Future Internet concepts, such as “identifier/locator split” work.

Alongside the workshops and the conference we had some vendor exhibitions showing the state of the art of NGN SDP platforms, as well as the newest tool kits from FOKUS, namely the universal client framework myMONSTER (www.mymonster.org) and the Next Generation Mobile Network prototyping platform OpenEPC (www.openepc.net).

We would like to thank all the sponsors, supporters, the workshop and session chairmen and of course the workshop and conference speakers for all their efforts making this event a unique forum providing a premier information source and technical networking platform for international experts from the related industries and well known academic institutions. And finally, we want to thank all the attendants for their interest and all the inspiring discussions. We hope you have made new interesting contacts and gained some inspirations for your future work and join the FOKUS family.

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Back to the Future

As announced at the event, the classical FOKUS IMS Workshop series has come to an end with its 5th iteration. This is due to the fact, that the “IMS” label is getting vintage in regard to real research challenges, although there are still a lot of open deployment and integration issues. In addition, you can witness, that due to progressing convergence and service architecture transition, the scope of the workshop has become increasingly broader, which is challenging the aggregation of all relevant hot topics into the well known two day format. Thus we decided to start from next year on a set of more focused “technology fora” around our test laboratories, which most likely will be collocated in time during summer and winter. Thus you can expect to see pretty soon some announcements on our respective lab portals, such as the Open SOA Telco Playground, the FAMElab, and the Future Internet Lab.

We hope to see you again or the first time at one of our future events.

Prof. Dr. Thomas Magedanz
and the TU Berlin/FOKUS team