Jan Gruntorád, Director of the CESNET Association, Invited to White House Advisory Board Meeting

The director of the CESNET association, Jan Gruntorád, is one of the 15 Europeans who received an invitation from the American National Coordination Office for Networking and Information Technology Research and Developments to come to the USA and join the American experts for discussions about the future of computer networking research. The workshop took place on 28th–30th September in Seattle with almost one hundred experts invited.

The objective of the Networking Research Challenges workshop was to outline essential technical challenges that the new generation of network technologies will have to face in order to be able to efficiently and effectively meet the needs of global communication networks in the next 5–15 years. The Coordination Office is covered by the American executive, enjoying a high reputation among the professional community. The White House mainly invites American experts to the Coordination Office meetings, who are complemented with top foreign experts dealing with the issues discussed. Conclusions of the Coordination Office have a significant impact on the future of the Internet and networking technologies in general.

Workshop participants discussed the Federal Plan for Advanced Networking Research and Development, which introduced – in March this year – a vision of advanced networking technologies. This vision is based on a design and architecture for security and reliability that provides for heterogeneous, anytime-anywhere networking with advanced capabilities such as a federation of networks across domains and widely differing technologies; dynamic mobile networking with autonomous management; effective quality of service (QoS) management; support for large-scale data transport and sensornets; near-real-time autonomous discovery, configuration, and management of resources; and end-to-end security tailored to the application and user.

The development of the Federal Plan is now in the hands of the Integrated Task Force on Advanced Networking (ITFAN), established within the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council.

The objective of the Federal Plan is to define a comprehensive research and development strategy needed to ensure successful development of future network architectures and to transition to these architectures. Four key research issues specified in the Federal Plan follow:

• Next-Generation heterogeneous networking (convergence of optical, wireless, packets-switched, and dynamic circuit-switched network);

• Network security;

• Federated heterogeneous networking and internetworking: resource reservation, security, management, performance monitoring, fault diagnosis, etc.;

• Networking challenges: 100Gbps+ data transport, end-to-end optical transport, cross-layer communications in dynamically reconfigurable optical networks, optical packet switching to eliminate router bottlenecks, sensornets, secure dynamic mobile networking.

The CESNET association was founded by universities and the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. The association is currently financed mainly from the resources of the governmental Committee for Research and Education and the resources of the members of the association. The association deals with the research and development of information and communication technologies, building and developing the national gigabit optical network, CESNET2, designed for research and educational purposes. With its research activities and accomplishments, the CESNET association can represent the Czech Republic in the pan-European GÉANT2 network construction project, actively participating in the project implementation.