Ireland – FI Forum & IPv6 Taskforce

Overall Scope

Irish Future Internet Forum

The Irish Future Internet Forum (IFIF) held its first meeting on 29 October 2008, in the Digital Exchange, Dublin, Ireland.

The IFIF was established by the Telecommunications Software and Systems Group at Waterford Institute of Technology, with the purpose of bringing the Irish ICT research community together in a common forum that would facilitate the discussion and knowledge transfer of issues related to Future Internet activities in the EU and globally. At the first meeting of the IFIF, 160 participants from Government, Industry and Academia met and discussed a number of topics related to FI, according to two common themes “Global Perspectives” and “Positioning Ireland at the centre of the Future Internet”.

The purpose of the “Global Perspectives” session was to stimulate a debate with the registered attendees about global FI initiatives and developments. The following provides an overview of the presenters and presentations; all presentation material is available to registered IFIF members, via the IFIF web site.

• Dr. William Donnelly, Head of Research and Innovation, Waterford Institute of Technology “Introduction” covering scope and goals of the IFIF.
• Dr.-Ing. Rainer Zimmerman, Head of Unit, Future Networks, European Commission, DG Information Society and Media “EU R&D Perspectives in Future Networks”
• Mícheál Ó Foghlú, Executive Director Research, Telecommunications Software and Systems Group, Waterford Institute of Technology “Future Internet Visions: An opportunity for Ireland”
• Dr. Ryutaro Kawamura, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan. “NWGN (New-Generation Network) Research Challenges in Japan”

The purpose of the “Positioning Ireland at the centre of the Future Internet” session was to discuss how Irish researchers can integrate their work with the core focus areas of the Future Internet. The following presentations were made at that session:

• Sam Samuel, Executive Director Bell Labs Ireland and UK, Alcatel-Lucent “Next Generation Internet” (the GENI/NSF view)
• David Kennedy, Director of Eurescom. Chair of the inter-ETP working group on Future Internet. “FIRE, the Future Internet and the European ICT Industry”
• John Strassner, Chair of the Autonomic Communications Forum “Ireland and the Future Internet”

The overall workshop was well received, and many attendees have expressed an interest in follow on workshops and seminars following the FI focus.

To that end it is planned to have two upcoming IFIF events later in 2009, one focusing on Services and one focusing on Security.

The TSSG group, founders of the IFIF are engaged in a number of FIA working groups, and the IFIF will have a booth at the upcoming FIA event in Prague.

It is envisaged that the IFIF will allow Irish industrial and academic partners to engage in discussions that will lead to new research initiatives related to FIA, for example generating high quality FP7 proposals in this research space. This work has already started with the TSSG group ensuring that, wherever possible, FP7 proposals produced by the group include 1-2 Irish partners.

Irish IPv6 Task Force

The Irish IPv6 Task Force was set up in 2004, chaired by Mícheál Ó Foghlú of the TSSG. The Irish National IPv6 Centre was set up in 2005 as a collaboration between the TSSG in Waterford Institute of Technology, the Hamilton Institute in NUI Maynooth, BT Ireland and HEAnet. The role of these organisations is to encourage the transition of the Irish network to IPv6 to allow continued growth of the Internet and its services in Ireland.

The flagship event of 28th January 2009, the Irish IPv6 Summit, showcased the work done to date, and the considerable work that still needs to be done, to achienve these goals. The on-line agenda contains links to streaming video of all the presentations.

• Minister Eamon Ryan, (DCENR) Opening Address
• Mícheál Ó Foghlú, (Chair, Irish IPv6 TF) Welcome Address
• Fred Baker, Cisco Fellow, Chair IETF IPv6 Operations Working Group (Cisco) KEYNOTE: IPv4/IPv6 Transition Status and Recommendations
• John Boland, CEO (HEAnet) Peak IPv4: The Case for IPv6
• Niall Murphy, (Google) Google and IPv6
• IPv6: Finding the Business Value Dave Northey, Principal Systems Engineer, Developer & Platform Group, (Microsoft Ireland)
• Giorgio Lembo, Head of Research and Development (Tiscali International Networks) IPv6 Services in Tiscali
• Detlef Eckert, Advisor DG-INFSO (EU Commission) KEYNOTE: European IPv6 Promotion
• John King, BT Design – IP Technologies Consultant (BT) IPv6 in BT – the story so far
• Zoltan Gelencser, CTO Network Solutions (Hutchison3G UK) IPv6 in Mobile and Fixed Mobile Converged Environment
• Ross Chandler, IP Network Architect (Eircom) Service provider planning for the IPv6 Internet
• David Malone, (NUI Maynooth) Don’t be afraid of IPv6
• Nick Hilliard, (Dublin INEX) IPv6 Usage in Ireland

It is very important for those interested in the Future Internet to realise that a successful transition from IPv4 to IPv6 in the next 5 years (from 2009-2013) is essential to ensure the ongoing growth of the Internet and its services. Whilst other more innovative ideas for Future Internet are worthy, none can up with an immediate deployable solution to the impending crisis for the IPv4 Internet when the address space starts to run out with the last IANA /8 block being anticipated to be allocated in late 2010, or early 20111.

Thus Future Internet activity needs to be about IPv6 and other potential alternatives post-IPv6. Any focus on longer term Future Internet activity cannot be allowed to detract from this very real shorter-term issue.

R&D Scope

The Irish Future Internet Forum is primarily focused on addressing the following issues:

• Network Architecture
• Service Architecture
• Trust, Security, Privacy, Identity
• Internet of “things”

Expected impact

“Building Ireland’s Smart Economy” defines the national strategy for the economic development of Ireland over the next five years. A key objective of this strategy is to position Ireland as a research and innovation hub for Europe.

The Irish Future Internet Forum recognises that positioning Ireland at the forefront of the future Internet is crucial to the Ireland meeting this ambitious objective. The objective of the Irish Future Internet Forum is to promote Ireland as an early adopter of the Future Internet through

• Creation of awareness of the Future Internet and its potential impact on the Irish economy
• Promoting participation of Irish stakeholders in the European Future Internet Initiates
• Encouraging greater R&D investment in activities around the Future Internet
• Encouraging the development of test sites and trails around aspects of the future internet
• Promoting greater strategic alignment between National and European research and innovation initiatives in the Future Internet Environment

Involved constituency

The IFIF stakeholders are the Irish Government agencies, Irish Industries and academia .

No investment has been made in relation to the IFIF. The TSSG group undertook to establish the IFIF and host its inaugural meeting from internal finances. However there are a number of complimentary “Future Internet” research initiatives which are funded through the Irish funding agencies.

• Irish National IPv6 Centre established through the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources (DCENR)
• The Irish Security Research Network (Serenity) was established by Enterprise Ireland and works in cooperation with Invest NI to promote the FP7 Security programme on the island of Ireland. The network currently has 547 participants with approximately 250 from industry, 192 from academia and 105 others (including civil servants; industrial development agencies; police/end-users; industrial associations; lobby groups; etc). It is an all-island network with 35 participants from Northern Ireland. The industry breakdown is that 201 participants are from SMEs with the balance of 49 employed by large industry (IBM Ireland, Intel, etc). Many of the SMEs are IT oriented. The Network provides information, facilitates meetings and generally promotes the civil security R&D agenda in Ireland. The potential to develop a viable commercial security sector is being actively pursued. An important new initiative associated with the network is the creation of the Centre for Irish and European Security with particularly emphasis on the security R&D agenda.
• Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) Research Cluster “The Federated, Autonomic Management of End-to-end Communication Services (FAME)” It bring together the major Irish based academic (TCD, NUIM, UCD) and industry (CISCO, IBM, Alcatel Lucent and Ericsson) players in the telecommunications management space.
• Higher Education Project Serving Society: Management of Future Communications Networks and Services investing the management of user centric services in Next Generation Networks (Future Internet). The academic partners are Interaction Design Centre in the University of Limerick and the Hamilton Institute in Maynooth University.

Other national research clusters that are relevant to the Future Internet Initiative :

• The Centre for Telecommunications Value-Chain Research (CTVR) brings together a multi-disciplinary group of researchers drawn from many Irish Universities together with a carefully chosen set of industrial partners to work on those engineering and scientific challenges that will make the most difference to the telecommunications networks of the future
• The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) the leading international web science and semantic web research institute located at Galway University