Subject: [gaia] Preliminary GAIA RG meeting minutes from IETF93

From: Matthew Ford <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 2015 10:58:09 +0100

Hi,

Preliminary minutes of the GAIA RG meeting that took place last week in Prague at IETF 93 are below.

Many thanks to Gorry Fairhurst for helping with note taking.

Please check these over and let me know of any necessary changes, especially if you spoke at the mic.

Thanks,
Mat

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GAIA RG Meeting @ IETF-93, Prague, CZ
WEDNESDAY, July 22, 2015
0900-1130 CEST Wednesday Morning Session I (Room: Berlin/Brussels)
Chair: Mat Ford.

0. Welcome & Administrivia (Mat Ford)
- Arjuna could not be present this meeting, and Mat gave his apologies.
- Agenda was accepted.
- Also noted the RG would be interested in ideas for opportunities for working together on topics in the Charter.

1. draft-irtf-gaia-alternative-network-deployments (Jose Saldana) 

Jack Thomson: Is it in the scope to characterise whether the network/service is resistant to censorship?

Jose: Maybe adding a security section would be useful

Jack Thomson: This could depend on the network technology

Mat: We are trying to spin up a workshop on the topic of censorship and alternative networks, so this may be interesting work to pursue in that context

John ?: Delivery by satellite is also being considered. Asymmetric delivery.

Jose: We could add a section.

C Perkins: The Internet evolved from a community effort to its current form, so evolution to some sort of paid service may be natural. Has this been considered? Several smaller efforts could start to merge. Have you thought about evolution to the paid service?

Jose: We looked at the model for each network, but not yet evolution.

Lixia Zhang: The Internet didn’t start as a community effort. On the draft, what is the main purpose? I’m interested in what you have learned, and what advice you may have.

Niels ten Oever: This is a great overview, but how will you set boundaries. There are lots of handbook materials that could be linked to, to avoid making this draft grow to 100s of pages. In particular we could define more on centralised v. decentralised approaches.

Jane Coffin: Energy is also important for rural areas.

Mat: I think the original motivation was to get a definition of “Alternative Networks”, it’s not scoped to be 100s of pages, but more can we define what we mean as Alternative Networks, and then provide examples. Lixia’s suggestion of looking at learning outcomes, could be a future document that may be useful.

2. Simplemux Traffic Optimization in the context of GAIA (Jose Saldana) 
- This topic will be discussed in a BarBOF on Thursday evening in Prague.

Gorry: Is there an effect if you see packet loss of compressed tunnel packets?

Jose: You would lose all the packets in a frame.

Gorry: And on wireless?

Jose: The larger packets may also be more prone to more loss on wireless.

3. Broadband to the Village (Nalini Elkins)
- Described motivation for the GAIA research.

Mat: Please speak to Nalini if you have any questions.

4.  Wireless for Communities (W4C) (Niel Harper)
- Described work in the ISOC-IEEE Open Wireless Training Programme.

5. TVWS: Challenges and Experiences from Latin America and Africa (Andres Arcia Moret)
- Spectrum and whitespace monitoring for communities.

Juan Carlos Zuniga: Is it intended to build a database that regulators do not build, or more to let people do it themselves?

Andres: In developing regions the database is often out of date or not accessible - we’re trying to empower people to build their own devices, or make strong propositions to regulator for community network services.

Niels ten Oever: Why did you choose not to use a RTL dongle, you could get more measurements from crowd-sourcing

Andreas: We are evaluating RTL dongle - the interface for RF Explorer is much easier to use and allows deeper investigation of spectrum. Software interfaces for RTL dongle were much harder to work on at the time we built this.

6. Rural PAWS (Gorry Fairhurst)
- Looking at rural Europe, still 5-10% don’t have a way to access cost-effective broadband.

Mat: What sort of a volume limit is used?

Gorry: Most people seem to use monthly limits. These can cause user support problems also, people increase their usage as they discover iPlayer and YouTube, and don’t understand their performance problems when they have used their month’s capacity, and raise a support ticket, or get upset.

Phil Eardley: Does each village have a satellite, or each premise?

Gorry: Each premise - we’ve been looking at shared infrastructure, but costs actually increased

Juan-Carlos Zuniga: Clarification question - PAWS = policy and wireless access?

Gorry: Arjuna has PAWS project about sharing urban wifi - our project is about using satellite to provide connectivity - there is also PAWS for regulator database for TVWS - lots of confusion

Juan-Carlos: Satellites usually do some tricks to compensate for long RTT - is it up to IETF to take those into account, or is it up to satellite operators to consider new protocol versions?

Gorry - Great question - don’t know - would love that we could make some changes to work better across the very heterogeneous data rates that we see. We don’t really want boxes in the middle of the network doing strange things.

Juan-Carlos: Challenge is that 5G is trying to go to very low latency, CDNs push content to the edge, but now we’re talking about delays of 100s of ms - you cannot have one size that fits all.

Gorry - so if we want everyone to be part of the Internet we have to cater for diverse capacity and RTT.

? - completely agree with your preso - challenge for 5G researchers - if your phone only has a couple of bars even SMS messages don’t get through.

Kevin Fall: DTNRG co-chair - advert for dtn WG - seems to me to get rid of the word speed - people used to low -latency environments -  latency aspect can really make a difference - interest in privacy etc. PEPs have been discussed in IETF for a long time - what that knob is going to be like is worth discussing

Gorry - DTN is interesting, using diffserv properly would also be interesting.

Elwyn Davies: How do you deal with the need for out-of-band support?

Gorry: Not an issue, in most cases people have phones in the UK. But problem is that help needed at two levels, many user support needs are better handled locally; engineering report needs telephone connection.

7. Service Centric Networking for the Developing World (Liang Wang)
- Using ICN for connectivity.

Nacho Solis: Is the idea to move services around?

Liang: There are also protocol issues, this looks at the higher layer design. We plan to make a prototype.

8. Citizen Community Clouds in Guifi.net (Felix Freitag) 
- Service deployment within community networks.

Mat: Please take questions to the list.

9. Social WiFi: Hotspot Sharing with Online Friends (Panagiotis Papadimitriou)
- Security concerns with hopping onto network devices to share capacity with friends.

Mat: Is Facebook’s announcement that they will start providing a directory of public keys likely to be relevant?

Kevin: WiFi Sense (MS Windows) is another way that was suggested.

10. Wrap-up (Mat Ford)
Mat: Please send thoughts on things GAIA should be doing on the RG mailing list, especially if you’re willing to contribute on a topic.

Meeting finished at 11:35