Keep it Sweet and Simple

3D printers present a whole new range of opportunities for users and telecommunications companies. They could also completely shape the landscape of factories and shops as we know them today.

They look like basic printers (a bit bigger) and they can produce a 3D object from a digital model of the object by laying down layers after layers of a special material until complete. You can use different materials, ranging from polymers, titanium, or even gold powder.

What could you print? I can think of things such as industrial components (pipes, parts for cars), clothes (e.g. shoes), furniture, jewelry, and why not, chip designs for electronics, and food!! (see this article for a printer that produces sugar objects)

For now they are mostly used to build models for architects and fashion designers, and they are a bit slow, but you can imagine how the technology could improve over the years to come.

I first saw one working last year at the Renacer conference and since then I have been thinking about their possible implications.

How many times you have waited for a product that is out of stock? What if you could just download a detailed digital design of the product and have it printed at home?

At that point, a lot of factories and shops could well disappear! Everything would be intellectual property and data flowing around. We would just spend time thinking and designing, not so much doing hand labor. Finally, human kind would be freed to do what they can do best, thinking. That would be a revolution!

And for Telcos and networking companies that would be a great opportunity too. Imagine how many terabytes of data would need to be shipped from one corner of the world to another to describe with the finest level of detail a given product so that the printer could build it. Huge volumes of data would be flowing from designers directly to user’s homes, and that would need to happen in a timely manner. We would be talking about shipping bits, not physical goods anymore, and Telcos would then become the FedEx of the Internet! Who said that networking was a dead field? J

For more info you can also see this Economist article.

Has the iphone really been hacked or just a “particular software” version of the software has been compromised? For the latest versions of the software you are basically temporarily (or permanently) stuck. If you want a more permanent solution, you need to go into painful hardware-based solutions.

The reason I am saying this is because a friend of mine recently bought an iphone in the US hoping to use it in Europe with some unlocking software and give it as a Xmas present. However, the iphone is still sitting in the box hoping that somebody breaks the new bootloader (see this blog for some efforts related to this http://11246unlock.com/index.asp).

Even if somebody manages to unlock the latest software (which surely will happen eventually), the rate at which iphone software versions are being hacked is slowing down and Apple could easily keep turning the screw releasing new functionalities more often and making life harder and harder. And things could get worse if Apple decides to use some sort of revocation system, e.g. similar to those used in many DRM systems. With DRM, content owners or distributors can revoke access to all previous hacked DRM software versions forcing you to keep your deviced updated.

So I guess, after too much hassle, hackers having proved their point will just give up, and eventually consumers will do to.

It is a while I wanted to talk about Japanese food. I think it exemplifies very well for the title of this blog — “keep it sweet and simple”. And I am not just talking about sushi, but the large variety of small, delicately cooked dishes, which are put together in little plates and beautifully decorated bawls.

When presented with the food, you feel a bit like an orchestra director, with lots of different instruments to play with, or rather, different foods to try. You can combine different textures, sweeter or spicier tastes, in whatever order you fancy, and then whenever you want, you come back to the sticky rice, or the delicious soup, which set the beat and average out your pallet for the next food composition. And the fascinating thing is that in each round you can play something different.

This is very different to traditional European food, where courses come one after the other and there is very little degree of flexibility on how and in which order you eat things. Ah… and a very important thing: regardless of how much you eat, it always sits very well with you, making you enjoy it for hours to come– what good is it excellent food if it leaves you with a heavy and painful afternoon/evening…?

Ok… new year and new twist to this blog. I have decided that from time to time, I will expand the topics and briefly talk about other things such as politics, food, and other interesting random things that I bump into (i.e. not just research).

So here is the first one: since I moved back to Spain I have noticed how much effort we spend discussing about issues such as terrorism or national identity, which although extremely important, are likely diverting a lot of the focus and energy needed to tackle some other main challenges that Spain faces over the coming years.

I have recently read two articles, which I believe crystallize very well some of these problems (e.g. education, labor market, culture). In general, a lot of similar things could be said for most of the southern EU countries, not just Spain.

The second transition (the Economist, 2008):
On the challenges that Spain faces over the long run and how to avoid a “gentle decline”.
[Article]

Locals vs Cosmopolitans (Xavier Sala i Martin, La Vanguardia, 2007):
Extremely well written article on how the world can be viewed both from a local or a global point of view, and the challenges that a country/region faces when globalization hits in and you still think locally.
[Spanish Article]
[Google Translated]

I have spent a couple of weeks in South Korea and Japan and in addition to being fascinated by their food and kindness, this trip has also given me a lot of things to think about. One of the things that surprised me is how the future IPTV is already a reality over there.

So what is happening today with IPTV? Well, IPTV is basically similar to Cable TV with about 100+ channels broadcasted using IP Multicast over DSL. All users are expected to watch one of those channels so dimensioning the system is easy. However, if all users start watching different TV programs at their most convenient time, then you have a major scalability problem since you need to handle a massive number of streams. Rather than dimensioning your network for the number of channels, you will have to do it for the number of users.

And this is exactly what is happening in Korea where a lot of people do not watch live broadcast TV anymore. Instead, VoD services offer all TV shows and movies that you could imagine for download. So you do not need broadcast TV nor have your VCR recording all the time. Instead, you can download the programs you missed whenever you want. As a result, most users are disconnecting their cable/satellite subscription as soon as they subscribe to the VoD service!

Of course, the content providers are cooperating and fostering this type of services by making the content available in a DRM digital form soon after it is aired (often within the same day). If most of the content is available through illegal P2P downloads anyway, they may as well try to engage the user through a legal VoD system and recover some of the revenue. This is an area where a lot of progress needs to be made in Europe/US before such service becomes available.

The cost of the service varies from $10-$15/month and you can basically download as many movies/videos as you want. Average download speeds in Korea are >30Mbps, so in the blink of an eye you have your favorite TV program. The system supports both progressive downloads for real-time viewing and background delivery.

What I found most interesting is the deployment model, which is based around Telcos (i.e. as opposed to VoD portals like Amazon or iTunes). The first generation of VoD services were target for the PC, however, the new generation is based on Set-Top-Boxes, which integrate better with the TV. The reason why ISPs are in a good position to provide this service is because the already have a relationship with the customer and thus, it becomes natural to provide users with a set-top-box which is ready for VoD. The set-top-box is given for free as long as the user subscribes for a given period of time (e.g. a year).

The fact that the VoD service is provided by a particular ISP is creating some interesting scenarios. For instance, some users are deciding to switch access ISPs but still keep their original VoD service with the first ISP. Of course, the traffic now is being carried through a number of visiting ISPs who expect some form of compensation, so the VoD ISP often needs to make financial arrangements with those visiting ISPs.

This all sounds very good, but it is posing major challenges in the IP distribution network since all users are pulling VoD content using point-to-point connections. So what is coming… well, you guessed it: P2P VoD and live-streaming in set-top-boxes, which should remove most of the heat from the ISPs VoD servers. We should expect some deployments of such P2P stb coming soon, so keep an eye…

These are some interesting companies to follow:

http://www.hanatv.co.kr/ (ISP providing VoD service)

http://www.icube.co.kr/ (VoD set-top-box company)

Finally, I forgot to mention how crazy young people are about Mobile-TV in their cell phones, especially in the underground. Here you have some of them, exhausted after watching their favorite soap opera J.

After three years of our initial research efforts with Avalanche, Microsoft is today making the resulting technology available as a public customer technology preview (CTP) under the name of Microsoft Secure Content Distribution (MSCD). See announcement at the Microsoft Research site for more details.

The MSCD technology is being used to distribute Visual Studio 2008 Beta-2. You can try it out and read more about MSCD by clicking here.

A major part in this success is due to the efforts that over these years Mitch Goldberg and John Miller’s incubation team (including my dear friend Armando Garcia Mendoza) have done at Microsoft Research Cambridge.

Apart from what or what not Microsoft will do with the technology in the future, the fact that anyone can now experience a secured P2P system using Network Coding is a great step forward for the research community. If you get to use it, please do not hesitate to leave your comments below.

John Miller is also running a blog where he is talking about MSCD and addressing some questions.

Yesterday I saw a BBC Panorama program on the risks of WiFi radiation. According to the BBC journalist, the measured WiFi radiation in a UK city center is about three times higher than the radiation produced by a GSM cell station about 100 meters away. The journalist was trying to make the case that if cellular GSM masts are required to be located away from schools, then, why encourage kids to use WiFi-enabled laptops or why deploy city-wide WiFi networks, including at schools and homes.

I have always been very skeptical about the risks of such low power radiation devices. After all, a WiFi router radiates about 100,000 times less than a domestic microwave. Nevertheless, the program showed people that claim to get sick with WiFi radiation. If this picks up with the public opinion, it could be a serious problem for WiFi systems, regardless of whether the problem exists or not.

The methods used in the program were far from being “scientific”, and there is a lot to debate about the results presented. Still, the reason I am concerned about this is because I had hoped that the WiFi revolution (both when being used as base stations and to create mesh networks) would not only provide wireless networks with greater capacity (in the information theory way), but would also be perceived as a “greener” wireless technology, since less powerful base stations have to be deployed. However, this seems to be under debate now. Not a good start…

I have now been to enough meetings regarding the Future Internet network design that I can write something that makes some sense. Here are some thoughts:

“Learn from P2P Systems”:

One thing that it is clear to me is that there are several lessons to be learnt from P2P systems. In fact, I would argue that most of the innovations in networking space during the last years have come from P2P systems (new routing algorithms, swarming protocols, NAT traversal, overlay naming, etc).

Why? well, I guess because people got tired of waiting for THE network to support IP multicast, anycasting, content-based naming, full host reachability, etc. Users got frustrated to hear that to test their ideas they had to change all routers in the world, build a new infrastructure overlay, or yet, convince all ISPs in the Internet. Instead, users realized the power of deploying new services with a simple piece of software that turned their personal computers into network elements. And voila, there you have it, some of the most successful and scalable systems ever deployed, Skype, BitTorrent, and more to come.

The beauty of P2P systems is that one can deploy hugely scalable services completely bypassing ISPs and without the need for end2end multicast, in a similar way that the Internet created a network that could route packets without having to go through the centralized control of phone operators.

“Storage in the Network”:

P2P or even Content Distribution networks have become so successful because they filled in a design gap. The Internet was not designed to optimize data delivery. Instead, it was designed to provide good support for end2end host communication. However, today’s Internet is mostly used for data diffusion, in many cases to millions of users. Delivering data is a quite different task than reaching a particular host. Actually, users do not care where the data comes from. As a result, things like distributing content have become unnecessarily hard, and have required the deployment of systems like Akamai or Bittorrent that had not been previously foreseen. One can say, though, that the beauty of the Internet is that it was designed to be flexible enough to enable content distribution networks to emerge without having to change the network infrastructure. Still, if today we were to design things from scratch, we would probably be adding massive storage capacity at each Internet router.

Why not democratize scalable content dissemination and make it part of the Internet core in the same way that connectivity was democratized as IP emerged?

“Diversity Everywhere”:

Another theme that emerges very strongly in the Future Internet design is the use of diversity and coding, especially in routing. Diversity has been used in many areas very successfully. For instance, P2P systems use a large number of diverse idle Internet paths to aggregate edge resources. Similar opportunities exist for wireless mesh networks where the wireless broadcast nature of the channel makes things even easier.

This is what I call spatial network multiplexing, where information is divided into small units and sent across the network using multiple paths. This can be thought of as an evolution of statistical time multiplexing, where packets share the same channel over time and is the basis of data networks.

One drawback of using diversity is that you now need to worry about which packet you should send through which path or which data got lost where. However, if you randomize information with things like network coding, then, you do not even need to worry about that. Another complication is that often paths are not disjoint, but shared — making congestion control and fairness much more complicated. This concept has some very powerful implications. For instance, how important is it to find the best path from the source to the destination for non real time applications? Should we redesign routing to include more diversity and coding?

For thoughts on this and others, see the recent NSF/EU meeting in Berlin: NeXtworking’07

I would also very much recommend Van Jacobson’s talk on a “New way to look at Networking“. Specially, the beginning of the talk has some “not to be missed” points.

Google -Van Jacobson’s talk at Google on a New look at Networking

Akamai bought Red Swoosh last week. I think it was about time that CDNs realized that the best way to fight your enemy is to join him, and that is exactly what Akamai has done here. CDNs were struggling to compete with P2P content distribution since P2P was, well basically free. This is a good move for Akamai, at least as a defensive strategy to control the P2P space and prevent other P2P players from eating into their business.

From a technical point of view, it also makes a lot of sense. P2P systems cannot provide the sort of service level guarantees that content producers demand (e.g. movie studios). Peer upload capacity is quite limited, and fluctuates greatly depending on the number of peers, etc. CDNs can instead provide assured capacity since their servers sit in well-provisioned data centers, kicking in to assure a certain SLA when P2P fails to do so. Not just that. Using CDNs also helps ISPs better manage their networks since less upstream traffic is generated. Traffic flows from the center of the network to the network edges, fitting well with current ISPs traffic engineering models which assumes that most traffic is downstream.

Overall, to me CDN and P2P is a marriage made in heaven. The next battle will be which P2P system becomes a standard (bittorrent, red swoosh, …) ? What about an HTTP-based P2P system and we all stop re-inventing the wheel?