Connections 2017 was held for the first time in the capital of Karnataka just before IETF 100. The event invited active participation from various stakeholder groups in the community.
The event was with filled with technical knowledge sharing sessions and discussions. The main goal of the event was to discuss the interests and issues important to the network deployment, operation and design of networks in India. It was a key focus since it helps in educating and facilitating member involvement in IETF. Special attention was laid to provide information, guidance and direction to assist involvement of Indian community in IETF.
Session on IoT Landscape in IETF by Carsten Bormann highlighting the major contributions to the technology through RFCs
Connections 2017 was organised for two days with nearly 150 participants. The event started with knowledge sharing by speakers like Fred Baker, Carsten Bormann, Paul Wouters, Elliot Lear, Darin Pettis, V Anil Kumar, Dr. Balaji Rajendran, Vipul Mathur, Vinayak Hegde, Vinod Kumar S, Pradeep Kathail, Syam Madanapalli, Vishnu Pavan Beeram and many more. Speakers shared their experience in various areas such as IoT, Security, SDN and APPS with the attendees.
The sessions were very inspiring but the one I found most interesting was the session on IoT Landscape in IETF by Carsten. He gave a very engaging walkthrough of the involvement of IETF in IoT technology since the nascent stage of IoT. The breakthroughs achieved particularly in 6LoWPAN technology motivated me to know more about the upcoming developments.
The panel discussion on localisation was really informative. The current standards and challenges around the world were discussed and later intense brainstorming helped to look at the problems in a different perspective.
Panel discussion on the language issues in global Internet governance
Last but not the least, Hackathon on second day of Connections encouraged developers to collaborate and develop utilities, ideas, running code and solutions that show practical implementations of IETF standards.
Hackathon highlighted the need to advance the pace and relevance of IETF standard activities from India by bringing in the Indian ICT & developers to collaborate on implementing emerging technologies. Hackathon was an entry point for developers and engineers to join IETF activities by initially providing implementation experience, later collaborating on standards development and taking part in IETF activities. With intention to educate new developers and expose them to new standards in IETF, the event encouraged attendees to a large extent in bringing in newer features (possibly from an Indian and/ or Industry/ ISP context).
Though the entire hackathon was an unforgettable experience, what captivated me was Whitefield framework demonstrated by Rahul Arvind Jadhav from Huawei, India. This framework is a simulation environment for wireless sensor networks by combining realistic RF simulation with the native mode use of popular IoT OSes such as Contiki/RIOT which scales really well to thousands of nodes.
Rahul explaining whitefield at Hackathon
All in all, Connections 2017 was an event to cherish for lifetime and deserves to continue for many more years to come. This was the first version of Connections 2017 and yet was a huge success. A big thanks to all the organizers and volunteers involved for the inexplicable experience.