[nmrg] Planning the next NMRG meetings for 2015

[Lisandro Zambenedetti Granville <[e-mail]>]

Dear NMRG subscribers

Back in 2011, we run a poll on this list to collect your feedback  in regard to topics that NMRG could focus on. At that point, the use of autonomic computing for network management revealed to be an often mentioned topic. From that point and on, we organized some meetings on autonomics for management that ultimately resulted in some I-D proposals, a BoF in the last IETF meeting, and the ANIMA initiative.

We’ve also been running a series of successful workshops “on the usages of NetFlow/IPFIX in Network management”, the last one being held in Berlim during IETF 87. A next workshop is planned for the NMRG meeting in the upcoming IETF 93 in Prague. Some other topic-specific meetings have been also organized, such as “lossy and low power networks management” (27th NMRG meeting during IETF 81 in Quebec), "Management Aspects of Emerging Networking Paradigms” (29th NMRG meeting during IETF 86 in Orlando), and the “1st Workshop on Large Scale Network Measurements” (31st NMRG meeting during CNSM 2013 in Zurich).

In order to bring more transparency and planning for the upcoming meeting in 2015 (thanks Juergen Schoenwaelder for comments on this regard in the list), we would like to share with you our initial thoughts, re-run the poll we mentioned in the beginning of this message, and collect your feedback for the NMRG next steps. We would like to organize in 2015 four NMRG meeting: 3 meetings during IETFs, in addition to an interim meeting together with IM or CNSM 2015, if the conference calendar allows that. As such, the upcoming meetings would be, in principle:

NMRG meeting during IETF 92, Dallas, Mar. 2015
- Topic: TBD

NMRG meeting during IETF 93, Prague, Jul. 2015
- Topic: Together with the Flamingo FP7 project, we scheduled another edition of the flow-based measurement workshop. Since the last workshop in this series happened in Berlim Aug. 2013, we believe Jul. 2015 would be a good moment for another issue.

NMRG meeting during IETF 94, Yokohama, Nov. 2015
- Topic: TBD

NMRG (interim) meeting, occasionally together with IM 2015 (May 2015, Ottawa) or CNSM 2015 (possibly Oct./Nov. 2015, TBD)
- Topic: TBD

NMRG meetings don’t need to have specific topics. The 35th meeting in Rio will not be centered on a single topic (call for contributions will be distributed in the next message). Still, having a set of main topics would certainly guide better the work developed under the NMRG belt. As mentioned above, we would like to hear the feedback of NMRG subscribers on topics that you believe should be addressed. As a reference and starting point for another poll, please observe below the list of topics (arbitrary order) considered back in 2011.

a) Management of the Internet of Things
b) Autonomics management / network learning
c) Network-wide safe configuration
d) Energy monitoring and management
e) Network flow measurement and analysis
f) Large-scale network-wide measurements
g) Management of virtual machines and clouds

Considering the above, we would like to ask you the following questions:

1) For the interim meeting, what seems more adequate for your personal calendar, i.e., IM or CNSM? We’ll try to accommodate the 2015 interim meeting in a moment that more people could potentially attend.

2) Would you include additional topics to the list above? Which ones? Some “modern” topics may be already covered with a slight different phrasing. For example, management of NFV would fall under item g) above or require a specific topic. 

3) Do you have interest in any of these topics? If so, in which order?

We’ll appreciate if you could reply these questions. That would give us important information for the next steps of NMRG.

Best regards,

Olivier and Lisandro
NMRG Co-Chairs