The Internet of Things: Getting to Self-Managed Networks

Henning Schulzrinne. Columbia University, USA.

Abstract: For the past thirty years, we have muddled through with semi-self-managing networks. Many routine functions that used to be manual, such as address assignment, have become automated, but networks, whether enterprise or home, are still “fiddly”, with unexplained failures, slowdowns and hard-to-test security. The Internet of Things, if it moves beyond a few devices in the home, may force a transition to a much more automated network, where configuration, functionality, fault location and security have to be done without human handholding, both because of the scale, and because they often replace much simpler dedicated systems managed by building engineers and plant maintenance workers. They are also likely to be critical to the functioning of buildings, factories and even cities, so that even brief outages are not tolerable. What are some of the challenges that we will need to solve in order to reliably operate and scale such systems? What aspects of networking need to change to deal with large-scale unmanaged install-and-forget networks? How can we make such devices trustworthy? Some solutions are emerging, primarily from industry consortia, but the approach seems fragmented and stove-piped. I will try to summarize a vision of emerging and to-be-developed or to-be-standardized components that may make IoT into boring infrastructure rather than buzzword.

Bio: Prof.  Henning Schulzrinne, Levi Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, received his Ph.D.  from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Massachusetts.  He was an MTS at AT&T Bell Laboratories and an associate department head at GMD-Fokus (Berlin), before joining the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering departments at Columbia University.  He served as chair of the Department of Computer Science from 2004 to 2009, as Engineering Fellow at the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 2010 and 2011, and as Chief Technology Officer and Technical Advisor at the FCC from 2012.

He has published more than 250 journal and conference papers, and more than 70 Internet RFCs.  Protocols co-developed by him, such as RTP, RTSP and SIP, are now Internet standards, used by almost all Internet telephony and multimedia applications.  His research interests include Internet multimedia systems, ubiquitous computing, and mobile systems.  He is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE, has received the New York City Mayor’s Award for Excellence in Science and Technology, the VON Pioneer Award, TCCC service award, IEEE Region 1 William Terry Award for Lifetime Distinguished Service to IEEE, the UMass Computer Science Outstanding Alumni recognition and is a member of the Internet Hall of Fame.