Since my last blog post on Intercloud, I have been rather busy working on related topics such as SLA instantiation, registry functions, security, and resiliency.However, I did attend the IETF 75 meeting held in Stockholm, Sweden. The Internet Society’s Standards & Technology (ISOC) team provides a view of hot topics for IETF 75 here: http://isoc-dc.org/wordpress/?p=444As we approach the “virtualization” subject, I noted two developments that took place as Birds of Feather Sessions at the IETF 75:

1. Multipath TCP Multipath TCP information:

• http://trac.tools.ietf.org/area/tsv/trac/wiki/MultipathTcp
• https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/75/materials.html (look for
”MPTCP”)

Functionally, Multipath can be either at the top of the transport layer or at the bottom of the application; such that every server, virtualized or not, should support multipath transport, so that mobile/multi-homed clients can use them robustly.

2. Network Virtualization Research Group under the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF)[to charter this group]: http://user.informatik.uni-goettingen.de/~stiemer/nvrg/There were several issues discussed such as:

• Operating System vs Network Virtualization
• Commercial Virtualization support
• Adjacencies to other IETF virtualization work e.g. TRILL, LISP, L2VPN, L3VPN, PPVPN and so on

The concept of pervasive virtualization is emerging as a hot topic around so called “Network Virtualization Economics.”

For more reading, see: “Network Virtualization: State of the Art and Research Challenges” by Chowdhury and Boutaba, IEEE Communications Magazine’s July 2009 issue.Finally, I came across a paper entitled, “Augmented Smartphone Applications Through Clone Cloud Execution,” by Byung-Gon Chun and Petros Maniatis, at Intel Research Berkeley. Clone Cloud produces an identical clone of a person’s smartphone that may reside in a cloud-computing environment such that the sharing of data between a mobile device and home-based computer would be a possible outcome of this research.“Augmented execution” and the power of cloud-computing in the mobile world, more to come!