15th NMRG Meeting in Bremen

The 15th NMRG meeting will be held in Bremen (Germany) on January 8-9 2004. The meeting will start at 09:00. The chair of this meeting is Jürgen Schönwälder. The local host of this meeting is the International University Bremen. Our contact is Jürgen Schönwälder.

Meeting Place

The meeting will be held on the campus of the International University Bremen, which is located in the northern part of the city of Bremen.

There are several online maps with directions on how to reach the International University Bremen. (Bute note: Do not confuse the International University Bremen with the University Bremen which is located closer to downtown.) There are several hotels in the harbour of Bremen-Vegesack, which is about 30 minutes walking distance or 5 minutes by bus from the University campus:

• Hotel Strandlust is a conference hotel with room rates starting at 90 Euros.
• Hotel Havenhaus is situated in a very old building with room rates starting at 60 Euros.
• Gästehaus Utkiek is a small family operated hotel with room rates starting at 40 Euros.

Agenda

• 09:00 Welcome
• 09:30 Using Distributed Object Technologies for Network Management (George Pavlou)

  The use of distributed object technologies for network management has been intensively researched in the mid- to late-1990's. The X/Open-NMF JIDM produced guidelines for traslating SNMP SMI and OSI-SM GDMO models to CORBA IDL and using CORBA as the access mechanism. This approach though was never adopted per se, but variations of it have been used mostly in telecommunication environments. It has recently become evident that a semantic rather than syntactic approach for converting SNMP SMI and GDMO models to distributed object interface specifications is the way forward. This presentation will review the state-of-the-art in using distributed object technologies for network management and will propose a framework that circumvents their usual problems, making potentially possible to adopt distibuted objects for Internet managament.

• 10:30 Coffee Break
• 11:00 Evaluation of Web Services as a Potential Management Technology (George Pavlou)

  Web Services has been recently emerging as an XML-based technology for distributed access to Internet services. A careful examination reveals that Web Services is a technology with many similarities to distributed objects, so it could also be used for network management. This could be possibly done through the framework presented in the previous talk, which avoids potential scalability problems. In this presentation, we first identify the similarities of WS and distributed object techbnologies. We then examine the usability and suitability of WS for network management and present a performance evaluation of selected scenarios in comparison to SNMP and CORBA.

• 12:00 Lunch Break
• 13:00 Path-Coupled Configuration of Passive Measurements (Marcus Brunner)

  Passive and active measurement technologies are available for measuring hop-by-hop properties of traffic along its path through the Internet. Passive technologies can measure these properties accurately, but configuring them for the measurement of a particular traffic flow at all hops requires significant overhead for measurement configuration. This problem does not apply to active measurements, such as traceroute, because probing packets automatically follow the same path as the traffic flow to be measured. However, active techniques measure properties/conditions of the injected traffic, which may differ from those of the traffic of interest. This presentation describes an approach that tries to combine the advantages of both worlds. We use path-coupled signaling for configuring passive hop-by-hop measurements along the path of a traffic flow of interest. We analyze advantages and disadvantages of the approach and describe first experiences.

• 14:00 Coffee Break
• 14:30 Improving Passive Packet Capture: Beyond Device Polling (Luca Deri)

  Passive packet capture is necessary for many activities including network debugging and monitoring. With the advent of fast gigabit networks, packet capture is becoming a problem even on PCs due to the poor performance of popular OSs. The introduction of device polling has improved the capture process quite a bit but not really solved the problem. This presentation proposes a new approach to passive packet capture that combined with device polling further improves it and allows, on fast machines, packets to be captured at (almost) wire speed.

• 15:30 Coffee Break
• 16:00 Controlling Firewalls and Network Address Translators (Jürgen Quittek)

  Firewalls and NATs are middleboxes and integral components of the Internet infrastructure but they are also obstacles for many communication services including IP telephony, video conferencing, etc. Several alternative approaches for overcoming this problem are currently under investigation. This presentation discusses three of them: (1) controlling middleboxes by more or less central entities like 'call agents', as investigated by the IETF midcom WG, (2) path-coupled signaling between terminals and middleboxes, as investigated by the nsis WG and (3) smart middelboxes configuring themselves based on observed signaling messages. A comparison of advantages and disadvantages of the approaches shows that in different scenarios, different approaches are preferable.

• 17:00 Wrap Up

Participants who already arrive on January 7th are kindly invited to attend Morris Sloman's talk titled Pervasive Computing: A Management Challenge. There will also be a general open talk given by Luca Deri about The ntop Project: Open Source Network Monitoring on Friday morning at 10:00.

Slides:

• Path-coupled Signaling for Traffic Measurement(Marcus Brunner)
• Improving Passive Packet Capture: Beyond Device Polling (Luca Deri)
• Solving the Middlebox Problem (Jürgen Quittek)
• Using Distributed Object Technologies for Network Management (George Pavlou)
• Performance Evaluation of Web Services as Management Technology (George Pavlou)

Participants

1. Marcus Brunner (NEC Europe, Germany)
2. Luca Deri (ntop.org, Italy)
3. Olivier Festor (LORIA-INRIA, France)
4. Torsten Klie (TU Braunschweig, Germany)
5. Aad van Moorsel (?)
6. George Pavlou (University of Surrey, England)
7. Aiko Pras (University of Twente, The Netherlands)
8. Jürgen Quittek (NEC Europe, Germany)
9. Jürgen Schönwälder (International University Bremen, Germany)
10. Radu State (LORIA-INRIA, France)
11. Frank Strauß (TU Braunschweig, Germany)