Brian Rosen, Neustar: Next Generation 9-1-1: Ready to deploy

The IETF has standards done, or just about done. NENA, the North American Emergency Number Association is in the very final stages of releasing its technical specifications. A recent FCC Notice of Inquiry started the process of getting the regulations in place. A number of states have RFPs in process, and some deployment has begun. A brand new, entirely IP based emergency call system is coming, and will affect every ISP, every carrier, and every SP that creates two way interactive media sessions in voice, video and/or text. This talk will focus on the impact on service providers and device vendors of this revolution in emergency calling.

Mohammad Shahidehpour, IIT: Smart Grid

The optimal operation of electric power systems is influenced by the unbundling of generation and transmission systems, enhanced monitoring of transmission systems by phasor measurement units, integration of renewable energy, real-time pricing and demand response, and applications of smart grid to the distributed control of power systems. Smart grid represents a vision for the digital upgrade of electric power transmission and distribution. The key to the smart grid utilization is the Internet protocol for shuttling a myriad of information back and forth between the electric utility sector and its customers. The distributed nature of restructured power systems and the new monitoring and control techniques introduce additional indices for measuring the reliability of electric power systems. This presentation will highlight some of the key issues with the operational reliability of restructured power systems and discuss the role of recent innovations and, in particular, the significance of smart grid design and applications to the power system operation and control. The presentation will also discuss the development of a microgrid which is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and implemented at Illinois Institute of Technology. The global IEEE activities for promoting smart grid technologies will also be discussed.

Roch Glitho, Concordia Institute for Information', Montreal: Cloud - based Multimedia Conferencing: Business Model, Research Agenda, State-of-the-Art

Multimedia conferencing enables the conversational exchange of media data. Cloud computing is an emerging multi-faceted paradigm (Infrastructure as a Service - IaaS, Platform as a Service - PaaS, and Software as a Service - SaaS). This talk describes a business model for cloud-based multimedia conferencing and uses it as a basis to derive a research agenda. We also present the state-of-the-art. The model is introduced, the research agenda articulated, and the state-of-the-art is contrasted to that agenda. A key role in the proposed model is played by the conference substrate provider. Conference substrate providers offer re-usable and sharable virtualized substrates (e.g. audio /video mixers, floor control algorithms) that can be assembled on the fly to build conferencing applications. The research challenges are numerous (e.g. identification, description and control (including composition) of multimedia conferencing substrates, mechanisms for enabling mobile devices to access the conferencing applications built with substrates) and the state-of-the-art still germinal.

Vijay Gurbani, Alcatel-Lucent: SIP CLF: A Common Log Format (CLF) for the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)

Web servers such as Apache and web proxies like Squid support event logging using a common log format. The logs produced using these de-facto standard formats are invaluable to system administrators for trouble-shooting a server and tool writers to craft tools that mine the log files and produce reports and trends. The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) does not have a common log format, and as a result, each server supports a distinct log format. This plethora of formats discourages the creation of common tools. Whilst SIP is similar to HTTP, there are a number of fundamental differences between a session- mode protocol and a stateless request-response protocol. We propose a common log file format for SIP servers that can be used uniformly by proxies, registrars, redirect servers as well as back-to-back user agents. Such a canonical file can be used to train anomaly detection systems and feed events into a security event management system.

Bruce Lowekamp, Skype: Centrally Distributed: P2P, the Cloud, and the Web

The past decades have seen rapid advances in both the technologies we use to communicate and the very definition of personal communication. Skype has demonstrated the commercial success of P2P technology for Internet communications. Others¹ use of centralized servers has given way to cloud-based products that offer scalability and reliability for modern communications platforms. Communications continue to evolve as we see web applications incorporating real-time voice and video. This talk will look at how the different technologies have approached delivering excellent user experiences---reliable and high quality---in the face of the challenges of the modern Internet. Reliable products are being delivered, but despite the different architectures and careful testing, the common denominator in significant failures continues to be software behavior at scale. To deliver high quality, real-time Internet communications to web-based applications, more work is needed to ensure the same user experience as desktop clients receive.