I had the chance to be attending an ANA meeting, at Mulhouse, France. Apart from having difficulties with the language, I had the chance not only to meet some very interesting people, but have a glimpse at Central European culture.

While it was not the first time I visited Central European countries and cities, I never had the chance to see deeper than the tourist wrap. I guess I was either too young, or there with the wrong purpose. I was also lucky to have some amazing people with me, and that’s what made the difference.

Perhaps one of the most difficult time of the year, for students at least, is the final exams. Full of studying, stress and anxiety. Fortunately my girlfriend was around for a few days, and things had a bright sight as well.

So, until 9th of May, not much will be going around here!

My exam schedule is:

• Monday - 28/4 - C.SC 251 - Networking - Done!
• Friday - 2/5 - C.SC 252 - Human Computer Interaction - Done!
• Monday - 5/5 - C.SC 253 - Distributed Systems - Done!
• Wednesday - 7/5 C.SC 353 - Advanced Networking - Done!
• Friday - 9/5 C.SC 254 - Languages & Compilation - Done!

Good luck to me, and see you after the 9th!

As part of my degree scheme (Computer Science Innovation @ Lancaster University), I had to work on a research project.

The subject was Functional Composition (I’ll blog later to elaborate), as part of the Autonomic Network Architecture project, which resulted a paper titled “A Functional Composition Framework for Autonomic Network Architectures” at the IEEE ACNM 2008: workshop on autonomic communications and network management.

I can not thank enough the people who have worked with me, for their time, patience and the
opportunities that they gave me with this project. It was a very interesting, productive and pleasant experience, which I hope we can continue and extend next year.

I had a small discussion recently with two of my University’s lecturers on Google Mail (Gmail). They asked me if I trust Google with my email, and my reply was why wouldn’t I? After all, I am no one important, with no critical information on my email account.

Gmail user-base increases rapidly with the announcement that they can take business users now, and you can host your domain there for free. The only “catch” is the text ads they serve (which I don’t mind at all), and that we have no idea what Google do with our emails and the personal information it collects daily, and there is a good change that we’d never know.

Then I’ve started thinking why I use Gmail, and what offers that I can not change to another email client. I’ve been using Gmail for the past 4 years and since I’ve never used a “fat” email client. But what does Gmail offers that make it so unique among competition?

It’s a webmail. I can be at my girlfriend’s house, open a browser and check my emails. It doesn’t require any forms of configuration, just your username and password, and you can have access to your emails from anywhere in the world you can get internet access
The search feature is fast. Its faster than 90% of “fat” email clients out there, and most of the times 10 times smarter as well.
Fast and simple user interface. For a web-app gmail is blazing fast, and also faster than most of the “fat” clients. In addition to that its very simple and intuitive to use. The interface is not cluttered, just the basics you need.
No more folders and subfolders and trees. Just labels. Why didn’t anyone think of this before? Folders make your life miserable, and gmail has taken them away.
Gmail removes you the burden of maintaining multiple email accounts, allowing you to forward all your emails there, and even reply with a different from address.
Also removes the burden of maintaining your own e-mail server. Yes, I can use my ISP’s mail server, but then again, why trust my ISP and not trust Gmail?

I could possibly find more to list here, but these are the main reasons that I still use Gmail, and not use plain-old-mail setup. But when they asked me that question they got me thinking. Working for an ISP, I have the luxury to have my own personal server hosted in their data-center for free, so I have the resources to host a few users on my own. So I’ve looked around on what’s available on free (preferably open-source) e-mail server solutions that come with a webmail.

Well the results were disappointing. No open-source e-mail server solution can reach Gmail’s usability. Some projects were too immature for everyday use, others had a very heavy web UI. Well, I can always use Apple’s excellent Mail app, but then again I refuse to use a fat email client, since I want to have access to my mail from the web. Unfortunately, there is no drop-in replacement for what Gmail offers.

What we can do about this? Although I find the thought of developing an AJAX web-2.0ish webmail client, modeled after Gmail’s line of success, very intriguing, it would take a lot of effort and time, which unfortunately currently don’t have. Unfortunately as the situation stands right now, I can’t see myself migrating from Gmail any time now, unless somebody offers me an alternative I haven’t yet considered.

Currently, the Internet Protocol, or IP, is build upon a static, layered architecture as designed in the early 80s. With the exponential growth of the internet this one-size-fits-all design starts to fail us in certain aspects. As a result, the current trent in network research is to navigate away from static, layered architecture to networks that feature functional atomization, diffusion and sedimentation.

As part of my BSc degree at Lancaster University, I have been working on a current research project, Autonomic Network Architecture, or ANA for short. The project aim is to develop an autonomic network architecture, featuring flexible, dynamic and fully autonomous formation of network nodes as well as whole networks.

The overall target of the project is to identify fundamental autonomic networking principles, which would enable a network to scale not only in size, but also in functionality. These requirements lead to properties such as self-monitoring, self-repair, self-management, self-optimization and self-protection which through research are proven to be the building blocks of networks that are richer in functionality and scalability.

A new Autonomic Network Architecture will emerge as a result of this research. This architecture will provide a framework for network function re-composition. The design that enable flexible, dynamic and fully autonomic formation of large-scale networks in which the functionalities of each constituent network node are also composed in an autonomic fashion. This architecture will also allow dynamic adaptation and re-organisation of the network according to the working, economical and social needs of the users. Moreover, it must support mobile nodes and multiple administrative domains.

My involvement focused more on the Functional composition framework, the mechanism that would enable nodes in this architecture to communicate with-in a compartment, based on the functionality they required. Currently, in the Internet, this is done statically, by looking the destination address in the IP packet and routing it accordingly, without taking in consideration other parameters, such as the load of the destination.

Functional composition will enable the dynamic routing of messages, using the help of a classifier. A node that would request a service, it would query a classifier, in order to give it the destination where it should route that kind of messages at the present time. The classifier after taking in consideration various user defined variables, as well as dynamic conditions, such as the load of a node, the type of application or who is requesting the service, will redirect the node to next hop, and so on. This builds a dynamic path with modules, which are put together using the functional composition framework, that compromise this modular autonomic network.

This is just a small introduction of the ANA framework and functional composition, since its a rather large project. I will post a more detailed post on Functional Composition soon. For more information regarding the ANA project please visit the project homepage