The second Workshop on "far out" research ideas of the institute is to be held on January 19th, 2011. The purpose of the second edition of this series of workshops is to have researchers from the institute present very innovative ideas that could lead to internal projects or even the offspring of a full line of research. The sessions encourage brain-storming around the ideas presented, in order to help give them shape and evaluate their potential.

The first Workshop on "far out" research ideas of the institute is to be held on December 17th, 2010. The purpose of the first edition of this series of workshops is to have researchers from the institute present very innovative ideas that could lead to internal projects or even the offspring of a full line of research. The sessions encourage brain-storming around the ideas presented, in order to help give them shape and evaluate their potential. 

Whereas prefix hijacking is usually examined from security perspectives, this paper looks at it from a novel economic angle. Our study stems from an observation that a transit AS (Autonomous System) has a financial interest in attracting extra traffic to the links with its customers. Based on real data about the actual hijacking incident in the Internet, we conduct simulations in the real AS-level Internet topology with synthetic demands for the hijacked traffic. Then, we measure traffic on all inter-AS links and compute the payments of all providers. The analysis of our results from technical, business, and legal viewpoints suggests that hijacking-based traffic attraction is a viable strategy that can create a fertile ground for tussles between providers. In particular, giant top-tier providers appear to have the strongest financial incentives to hijack popular prefixes and then deliver the intercepted traffic to the proper destinations. We also discuss directions for future research in the area of hijacking-based traffic attraction.

BitTorrent is the most popular P2P content delivery appli-cation where individual users share various type of content with tens of thousands of other users. The growing popular-ity of BitTorrent is primarily due to the availability of valuable content without any cost for the consumers. However, apart from required resources, publishing (sharing) valuable (and often copyrighted) content has serious legal implica-tions for users who publish the material (or publishers). This raises a question that whether (at least major) content publishers behave in an altruistic fashion or have other incentives such as financial. In this study, we identify the content publishers of more than 55K torrents in two major BitTorrent portals and examine their behavior. We demonstrate that a small fraction of publishers is responsible for 67% of the published content and 75% of the downloads. Our investigations reveal that these major publishers respond to two dif-ferent profiles. On the one hand, antipiracy agencies and ma-licious publishers publish a large amount of fake files to protect copyrighted content and spread malware respectively. On the other hand, content publishing in BitTorrent is largely driven by companies with financial incentives. Therefore, if these companies lose their interest or are unable to publish content, BitTorrent traffic/portals may disappear or at least their associated traffic will be significantly reduced.

This talk will introduce P2PSIP (Peer-to-peer Session Initiation Protocol) technologies, including the most common protocols and algorithms. The talk will also discuss the performance of these technologies in different network settings and the tradeoffs associated with deploying P2PSIP systems. Additionally, the talk will cover issues related to security and NAT traversal.  

Marco Ajmone Marsan holds a double appointment as Chief Researcher at IMDEA Networks (Spain) and Full Professor at the Department of Electronics (Dipartimento di Elettronica) of the Politecnico di Torino (Polytechnic University of Turin) (Italy). He is the founder of the Telecommunication Networks Group, one of the top research groups in networking in Europe, based at the Politecnico di Torino.

Event program: 09:00 – 09:30 Welcome and registration 09:30 – 09:50 Opening of the Symposium D. Arturo Azcorra, Director General, CDTI D. Francisco Marín, President of Area of Activities for Technological Innovation, AETIC D. Albert Banchs, Deputy Director, Institute IMDEA Networks D. Carlos Balaguer, Vice-Rector of Research, UC3M 09:50 – 10:15 Presentations Presentation of Institute IMDEA Networks, D. Albert Banchs (  Download presentation 2006 Kb ) Presentation of the departament for I+D+i of AETIC, D. Juan Gascón, Director for Digital Content & R&D, AETIC (  Download presentation 2256 Kb ) 10:15 – 11:00 Energy Efficiency Energy-efficient Networking at Institute IMDEA Networks D. Antonio Fernández Anta, Senior Researcher, Institute IMDEA Networks (  Download presentation 160 Kb ) TELVENT Energía D. Francisco Romero, Director for Business Development (  Download presentation 1.757 Kb ) INDRA Dña. Marta Arias, General Manager for Energy Efficiency (  Download presentation 538 Kb )

Energy conservation is drawing increasing attention in data networking. One school of thought believes that a dominant amount of energy saving comes from turning off network elements. The difficulty is that transitioning between the active and sleeping modes consumes considerable energy and time. This results in an obvious trade-off between saving energy and provisioning performance guarantees such as end-to-end delays.

Rade Stanojevic obtained his B.Sc. in Mathematics from University of Nis, Serbia and a Ph.D. from Hamilton Institute, NUIM, Ireland. His current research interests span performance evaluation, network economics and energy aware computing. His work on decentralized cloud control has been awarded the ACM SIGMETRICS 2008 Kenneth C. Sevcik Outstanding Student Paper Award and the IEEE IWQoS 2009 Best Paper Award. Since fall 2010 he is a staff researcher in the IMDEA Networks Institute, Madrid. Prior to that he was a post-doc with Telefonica Research, Barcelona.

In the context of "Researchers' Night, Madrid 2010 – Creativity for progress in Europe", the IMDEA initiative will take part in the “Why I am a scientist” event, through the participation of directors from each one of the eight member institutes. Why I am a scientist Organiser: Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies (IMDEA) Hour: From 18:00 p.m to 19:30 p.m