Session 2C: End-to-End
Jean-Paul le Guigner
Panel Discussion
Users from the education and research communities are more and more dependent on the Internet for their day-to-day work. Efficient collaboration through innovative usage such as GRID computing, videoconferencing, and distributed applications require good end-to-end performance, easy connectivity and smooth operation.
However the intrinsic distributed nature of the Internet, without end-to-end governance or even global vision on the coherence and performance of the different infrastructures, the seriousness of management, the enforcement of security, and the stability of application protocols make it difficult to have a seamless service between users around the world.
Among the different stumbling stones paving the way before us when travelling the Internet, one can easily extract a subset of major well-known ones considered to be a "pain in the neck" by the users:
- hard-to-cross firewalls implementing too much security from the users' perspective, although too little for the administrators,
- non-global and untrustworthy authentication due to a deficit of coordination in the PKI area, address translation facilities (NAT), and different addressing or naming problems that can occur,
- slow "last mile" bandwidth and poor performance from equipment,
- legal issues (law enforcement), or even telecom regulations,
- lack of standards for real distributed applications.
The E2E session will ingenuously reveal why things do not work as they should by raising the issues and expectations forming the basis for the debate that follows.
Panel: Harald Alvestrand, Brian Carpenter, Jon Crowcroft, Dietmar Erwin, Daniel Karrenberg, François Fluckiger and Lawrence Lessig