ACM Computing Review
17 March, 2014


Bridging the Gap Between Internet Standardization and Networking Research

Aaron Yi Ding - Cambridge University / Helsinki University / HIIT
Jouni Korhonen - Broadcom
Teemu Savolainen - Nokia
Markku Kojo - Helsinki University
Jörg Ott - Aalto University
Sasu Tarkoma - Helsinki University / HIIT
Jon Crowcroft - Cambridge University


ACM Computing Review:

"
Bridging the gap between the network research community and Internet 
standards is an important topic. Most network research has not been 
turned into an Internet standard, while some research comes a long way 
in order to become an Internet standard. Very few studies investigate 
this issue because it extends beyond purely technical concerns.

The authors have an advantage in investigating this issue since they 
have tightly collaborated on projects with academic researchers and 
industrial professionals. They thoroughly present their observations and 
share their experiences in this paper. The challenges for this gap are 
defined in two parts: technical challenges and nontechnical challenges. 
A good point is that the authors share the nontechnical challenges that 
might be ignored by researchers and industrial professionals. The 
authors, aware of the gap, also find two major opportunities that can 
extend research works to standardization contributions, which is 
encouraging to networking researchers.

Based on their past experiences, the authors share two concrete case 
studies: mobile traffic offloading and Internet protocol version 6 
(IPv6) transition technologies. The mobile traffic offloading case shows 
substantial scientific results, but it also shows an under-performing 
standardization effort. This case proves that the proposal, which does 
not fit in an existing mindset, is usually a failure. On the other hand, 
the case of IPv6 transition technologies shows good results in both 
academia and industry, because the research proposal has extensibility 
and minimum impact on the existing infrastructure. The authors then 
share their lessons and suggestions to bridge the gap. These are honest 
and useful to both academia and industry. Readers will see the potential 
for comprehensive collaboration between networking research and Internet 
standardization.
"


ACM SIGCOMM CCR Chief Editor:

"
Its focus is to identify ways to bridge the gap between the networking 
community and the Internet standardization bodies. The authors, from 
Broadcom, Nokia, University of Cambridge, Aalto University and 
University of Helsinki, are describing the differences and similarities 
between how the two communities operate. They further provide 
interesting data on the participation of academic and industrial 
researchers in standardization bodies. They discuss ways to minimize the 
friction that may exist as a particular technology is making the leap 
from the scientific community into the industry.
"


Acknowlegement

Dina Papagiannaki (Telefonica)
Henning Schulzrinne (Columbia)
Lixia Zhang (UCLA)
Joe Touch (USC)
Michael Welzl (Oslo)
Colin Perkins (Glasgow)
Jukka Manner (Aalto)
Pasi Sarolahti (Aalto)
Eliot Lear (Cisco)


ACM Journal publication DOI.

Open-Access PDF