I was invited speaker at USRR 2015 – 3rd International Workshop on Understanding the inter-play between Sustainability, Resilience, and Robustness in networks in Munich. It was co-located with RNDM – the International Workshop on Reliable Network Design and Modeling. It is a single track workshop gathering prominent scientists and researchers in the area from around the world, sponsored by IEEE Communications Society. Since it is a single track event there is room for deep fruitfull discussions between researchers during the sessions. My talk was on ” Interplay between Energy Efficiency and Survivable Network Planning with Shared Backup Resources”. I wrote about this interesting trade-off before so this time I will not go into this topic.
This year there were two Keynote speakers. The first one was Bjarne E. Helvik from Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He delivered a very inspiring talk on ” Dependability of non-engineered and unmanaged system of systems”. I can feel that when you read these lines you are almost getting lost. What is the system of systems? Why unmanaged? Think of today’s ICT infrastructure and future trends such as IoT, connected devices, furnitures, vehicles, robots, everyhing… If we look at this new internet of things it is a system of systems: smart grid, smart cities, smart homes, etc. continuously growing, highly dynamic and heterogeneous. This extremely complex system is composed of sub-systems which can be seen as autonomous systems and there is no central entity to manage or design this whole system. Instead all autonomous systems are designed and engineered locally tailored to different requirements.
” … the overall system is a result of commercial agreements rather than the outcome of an engineering process. Furthermore, there is no entity that has an overview of the overall system and may efficiently manage failure scenarios involving multiple autonomous systems.”
The second keynote was given by Roland Wessaely from Atesio, the company specialized in optimization in telecommunications. He presented the results from the European FP7 project DISCUS (DIStributed Core for unlimited bandwidth supply for all Users and Services). I was involved in DISCUS as the coordinator of KTH part three years ago before I handed the project to my colleagues in KTH ONLAB. Therefore it was very interesting for me to hear the results from Roland. The talk was about optimization and planning of the end-to-end DISCUS architecture focusing on UK scenario providing very high network availability for end user services.
Talking about RNDM, I should also give the good news that next year RNDM will be organised in Sweden.
