[e2e] any source unicast

[Jon Crowcroft]

On Any Source Unicast...

So i just caved in and bought a digital flatscreen TV - 

it is quite nice in terms of multimedia, 
BUT i now see why the pressure is on to drive the world to digital television - 

nothing to do with display technology  
(any how, purists will tell you that CRTs are still,
just about, the crispest pound for pound).

What Digital TV does is lock you in to a (hammer style cheap)
telecom circuit nightmare reality of the 1970s. 

With an analogue transmission&receiver, 
you basically live in an any-to-any world, 
and all the devices switch everything through ether-like
(like multicast too:).

in the digital world, you can plug in what is, au fond, 
an analogue signal into the first hop, 
but once its tuned and decoded that flow, 
it wont deliver you any other flow off the "air". 
This means that to watch channel X while recording channel Y 
(a perfectly legal thing to do in the UK), 
you have to have 2 digital receivers
(once the legacy analogue channels go away) - 

and worse, in our house there are 6 people, 
3 or 4 TVs, 3 or 4 VCRs, 4 or 5 DVD capable devices 
(if i include games consoles)  - 
interconnecting all of these locks up virtual circuit resources, 
and ties you down to a real limited set of scenarios 
without some massive switch -

they didn't even learn the ATM lesson of having 
virtual paths to put virtual channels in. 

But worse is to come: Once you connect up some HD devices, 
you find HDMI supports a thing (not completely standardised yet) 
called HDCP (high definition copy protection) - 
this means that you cannot put in anything in the path 
(e.g. a T-connector) 
to copy something you are viewing;
_everything_ has to be point-to-point authorised ...

and coz it aint all standard yet, 
some things don't interwork - 

[interestingly, amusingly, some display devices let you disable HDCP - 
a bit like the DVD players that turn of region control:) - 
basically, in a free market, someone is gonna work around this godawful stupidity, 
then everyone will eventually follow.]

Why is this relevant end-to-end? 
well this ought to be obvious, but if not, 
let me spell it out ...

A lot of Next Gen Internet ideas are being cast about right now. 
Some of them have the flavour of circuits. This is a foul and bitter flavour, 
and should be resisted at all costs, 
since it reduces the net value of an interconnect, 
increases its costs, and massively reduces its flexibility 
(and indeed, reduces everything to the lowest common denominator technology, 
and locks you in there til kingdm come).

In wireless network research, 
a lot of folks seem (thankfully) to be going the _opposite_ direction, 
with a more open, many-to-many, multiradio, mesh/community/adhoc/dtn 
thousand flowers (flow pun intended:) flourishing  - indeed
network coding, (just for 1 example) means you _have_ to allow in-net copy!).

but the whole "triple play" by telecos to pull 
TV, Telephone and Internet into one box, 
seems to be more and more predicated on a fundamental 
misdirection of the world.

this is not about QoS - this is about lockin.

happy new year

jon
p.s. for the less mad: see ->
--------------------------------------------------------------------
               The Second International Workshop on
    Mobility in the Evolving Internet Architecture (MobiArch 2007)
                   Kyoto, Japan, August 27, 2007
        (to be held with ACM SIGCOMM 2007, August 27-31, 2007
       http://user.informatik.uni-goettingen.de/~mobiarch/2007
--------------------------------------------------------------------

With the recent development of technologies in wireless access and
mobile devices, user, terminal, and network mobility has become an
indispensable component of today's Internet vision, and it is likely to
continue in the near future, while affecting the whole architectural
design of the future Internet. Yet, issues like efficient mobility
management and optimization, locator-identifier split, multihoming,
security, and related operational/deployment concerns are still in their
early stages of development. Moreover, the Internet architecture, its
end-to-end principles, and business models will require rethinking due
to the massive penetration of mobility into the Internet.

MobiArch'07 welcomes submissions, from both researchers and
practitioners, in exploration of recent advances in architectures,
protocols, and experiences with emerging technologies on wireless and
mobility over the Internet, with an emphasis on wireless infrastructures
and mobility patterns for mobility support, new mobility protocols,
service discovery, routing and location management, mobile network
performance evaluation and modeling, multi-homing, security,
architectural impacts and deployment considerations.

Topics of Interest:
==================
Topics of MobiArch’07 cover all aspects of architectural issues and
system support for wireless and mobility in the Internet, including but
not limited to:

- Impacts of new wireless technologies/services and mobility patterns on
the Internet architecture
- Architectures and protocols for mobility support in the Internet,
ranging from approaches in link, network, transport to
session/application layers and cross-layer design
- Location management, positioning and data management systems for
wireless and mobility
- Routing and addressing, including locator/identifier split issues and
their impacts to the Internet architecture
- IP multihoming including flow distribution and load sharing for
wireless and mobility
- Performance evaluation, experimentation and modeling of mobility in
the Internet
- Accounting, access control, security and privacy issues and impacts to
Internet architecture
- Economic, scalability and deployment issues of mobility infrastructure
design
- Mechanisms and issues with connecting developing regions into the Internet

Following the success of MobiArch'06, the MobiArch'07 workshop will be a
single-track one-day workshop. Early stages, position papers, systems
and measurement papers will be particularly welcome. The proceedings
will be published by the ACM and ACM digital library.

Submissions:
===========
Submissions must be made to MobiArch'07 EDAS entry:
http://edas.info/5238, following the guidelines in MobiArch'07 webpage:
http://user.informatik.uni-goettingen.de/~mobiarch/2007

Important Dates:
===============
Paper registration:  March 20, 2007
Submission Deadline: March 27, 2007
Acceptance Notification: May 15, 2007
Camera-ready version due: June 12, 2007
Workshop: August 27, 2007
SIGCOMM Main Conference: August 27-31, 2007

PROGRAM CO-CHAIRS
=================
   Xiaoming Fu, University of Goettingen (Germany)
   Katherine Guo, Bell Labs (USA)
   Sue Moon, KAIST (Korea)
   Ryuji Wakikawa, Keio University (Japan)

PUBLICITY CHAIR
===============
Jon Crowcroft, U. Cambridge (UK)

Please consult the Program Co-Chairs
(mobiarch at informatik.uni-goettingen.de) if you are uncertain whether
your paper falls within the scope of the workshop.