18.10.2019CSG at IEEE LCN 2019

This year's LCN 2019 (IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks) took place in Osnabrück, Germany, and accounted for an attendance of approximately 1501 people from the computer networks research area, spread across academia and industry. The myriad of topics presented ranged from wireless underground sensor networks to TCP in high speeds networks (e.g., 100 Gbit/s enabled networks). Even though the blockchain topic was not explicitly mentioned in LCN's call for papers, it was discussed in 5 full papers and 2 posters, addressing its usage in applications on IoT-enabled environments, its employment to provide privacy in charging connected electric vehicles, and to implement access control in sensors from smart cities.

Therefore, CSG appeared during this year's LCN 2019 with two successful blockchain submissions as well. The full papers on "Scalable Transport Mechanisms for Blockchain IoT Applications" by Eryk Schiller, Sina Rafati, Timo Surbeck, and Burkhard Stiller and "Bifröst: a Modular Blockchain Interoperability API" by Eder Scheid, Timo Hegnauer, Bruno Rodrigues, and Burkhard Stiller were presented on the first and the last day of LCN, respectively, with each at an 35+ attendee's audience of interested researchers. Additionally, in replacement of the original full paper presenter Sajad Khorsandroo, S. Rafati stepped in and presented the paper on "White Box Analysis at the Service of Low Rate Saturation Attacks on Virtual SDN Data Plane", too.

Sina Rafati and Eder Scheid at the start of their presentations, respectively

The LCN 2019 keynote talks, presented by renowned researchers, addressed future research directions in the networking field: The first keynote by Olivier Bonaventure explained how to provide a flexible and extensible network stack, enabling the deployment and installation of capabilities (e.g., monitoring) by relying on the communication between network devices, but not on the will of vendors, which implement the desired capability. The second keynote speaker Frank H. P. Fitzek addressed novel technologies, such as network slicing, 5G, and Network Function Virtualization (NFV), to allow for a low-latency and ultra-reliable communication to build up the tactile Internet. Lastly, Javier Manuel Gozalvez Sempere discussed how autonomous vehicles can share information about their sensors with other autonomous vehicles nearby in a collaborative manner to increase the security of pedestrians (e.g., alerting about pedestrians outside the view of the vehicle). As such this approach aids the decision of possible actions (e.g., entering  a dense traffic highway or a road under construction).

While S. Rafati and E. Scheid enjoyed the setting at LCN 2019 as well as the many discussions on their papers, including many human networking aspects, B. Stiller had been awarded a commemorative plaque of serving as an LCN Steering Committee (SC) Member for the past lucky 13 years.

Sina Rafati and Eder Scheid at LCN 2019 and Burkhard Stiller joined by Soumaya Cherkaoui

Eder John Scheid