Simpleweb: Podcasts on network management The Simpleweb - sponsored by EMANICS

The Internet has experienced a tremendous success. Starting from an academic (and somewhat free) communication network, it has been expanded to commercial purposes and has led to congestion. The way customers are currently charged is based on a so-called flat-rate price: they pay a fixed subscription fee to an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and have an unlimited access to the network. This simple and attractive method is nonetheless unfair since it does not discriminate users. Introducing new pricing schemes seems a valuable option for allowing congestion control and service differentiation among users or applications. While congestion hardly occur in the backbone network, we still have to investigate ways to control it in access networks, the so-called last mile problem, with a special emphasis on wireless. The challenge is therefore to design a pricing scheme representing a good trade-off between economic efficiency and engineering simplicity and that both users and providers would accept. During this talk, we will review few models for pricing bandwidth usage. We will also briefly present other contexts where pricing seems an appropriate way to incentivize users to participe by rewarding them in situations where each new user introduces an added-value to the network capability, such as for example in ad-hoc networks or peer-to-peer networks. A current research direction we will emphasize comes from the observation that there is not only a relation between customers and providers, but also a competition among providers and heterogeneous technologies, and this aspect needs to be integrated in the models and proposals. A typical example is the competition for access points at a WiFi hotspot, or the choice between different access media (WiFi, WiMax, UMTS, etc.). Similarly, pricing is also now a requirement among competitive providers themselves, which need to exchange traffic to ensure end-to-end delivery. Those points are still in their infancy and we will introduce the challenges and some proposals. This talk is at the heart of cross-disciplinary and novel aspects of networks and system management, on the economics of infrastructure management. It involves networking techniques, quantitative network modeling and model evaluation methods, economy themes, game theory, control theory and optimisation.

Closing of the IFIP/IEEE Integrated Management 2009 Symposium. Announcement of the Dan Stokesberry Award to Raouf Boutaba, Best Paper Award, Best Dissertation Award and travel grants. Announcement of NOMS 2010, Manweek 2009 and IM 2011.

The theme of IM 2009, "Making Management Scalable, Robust, Cost-effective and Revenue Generating", points to key issues of a technical and business nature that the field has been trying to address for many years, yet continues to struggle with. At the same time, this has not prevented dramatic progress in the technologies they manage. Networks continue to grow, communication services are getting ever more pervasive, and innovation in those services continues to grow. The question then arises, which impact does progress in management technology really have on the technology that it manages and its supporting businesses? Is the impact merely one of incremental improvements in economics, or is it more profound? If management was more scalable, robust, cost-effective, and revenue generating than it is, what would be the impact on the managed technologies and their adoption? Would we see even more rapid progress, would we see different and more powerful services than we do today, or would there be entirely new classes of applications that would suddenly become feasible? In other words, is management a bottleneck? On the other hand, is management in reality doing just fine and its challenges mostly imagined? In which areas does progress in management really matter, and why? Panelists: Alexander Clemm (panel moderator), John Strassner, Alan Ganek, Joseph L. Hellerstein, Larry Bernstein, George Pavlou

The theme of IM 2009, "Making Management Scalable, Robust, Cost-effective and Revenue Generating", points to key issues of a technical and business nature that the field has been trying to address for many years, yet continues to struggle with. At the same time, this has not prevented dramatic progress in the technologies they manage. Networks continue to grow, communication services are getting ever more pervasive, and innovation in those services continues to grow. The question then arises, which impact does progress in management technology really have on the technology that it manages and its supporting businesses? Is the impact merely one of incremental improvements in economics, or is it more profound? If management was more scalable, robust, cost-effective, and revenue generating than it is, what would be the impact on the managed technologies and their adoption? Would we see even more rapid progress, would we see different and more powerful services than we do today, or would there be entirely new classes of applications that would suddenly become feasible? In other words, is management a bottleneck? On the other hand, is management in reality doing just fine and its challenges mostly imagined? In which areas does progress in management really matter, and why? Panelists: Alexander Clemm (panel moderator), John Strassner, Alan Ganek, Joseph L. Hellerstein, Larry Bernstein, George Pavlou

Opening of the IFIP/IEEE Integrated Management 2009 Symposium. Recorded at the 11th Integrated Management Symposium (IM 2009), which was held June 1-5, 2009 in Long Island, New York, USA at Hofstra University.

Over time the "Internet" has become the central element for integration of network functions and services. In a very profound sense the "Internet" has dramatically lowered the time and cost for creating new applications, new services, and new ways of social interaction. At the same time what we now call the "Internet" includes an enabling layer of computing, storage, communications, software, and special purpose devices. The "Internet" is increasingly the delivery mechanism for critical services. Some of these are related to: control systems for utilities and transportation; financial services; healthcare; safety; law enforcement; and emergency response. The consequence is that at least portions of the "Internet" must exhibit reliability, high availability, and scalability to serve large numbers of citizens. The talk will concentrate on the approaches and challenges of managing and operating hardened IP infrastructure suitable for critical services and will examine the requirements from illustrative application examples.