EIFFEL at ETSI

Last week, I was invited to the ETSI Board meeting in Sophia-Antopolis for presenting thoughts around Future Internet activities, particularly around EIFFEL and standardization. It was not quite the usual audience for me. ETSI, as a standardization organization, is rather procedural in order to get things done, which somehow seems to be at odds with research and its relative lack of direction, if you will.

The particular session in the board meeting was led off by Joao daSilva, Director for Converged Networks and Services at the DG Information and Media of the European Commission. He outlined the necessity for research and development in this area and presented the activities of the EU, in particular in the current calls for FP7.

I followed his presentation with an overview of EIFFEL (showing a new lifecycle slide that summarizes many of the wordy ones I used before), summarizing the findings of the whitepaper and the actions following of it, i.e., the submission of a Strategic Support Action for the EU FP7 Call 1. After that, I took the chance of presenting some thoughts on future standardization to the ETSI board members. These thoughts were mainly driven from a system design perspective, borrowing arguments from the Design for Tussle paper by David Clark et al. That part did spark quite some discussions due to the relevance to ongoing discussions within ETSI as to future modi operandi for an organization in a changing world of telecommunications.

You can find the slides of my presentation here. Please take the second part of the presentation with some caution since the thoughts are rather rough and not fully finalized.