The European project Flamingo (yes, simply a name, not an acronym) just finished its kickoff meeting at the University of Twente. The project partners are: University of Twente (Netherlands) INRIA/LORIA (France) University of Zurich (Switzerland) Jacobs University Bremen (Germany) University of Federal Armed Forces Munich (Germany) Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (Spain) iMinds (Belgium) University College London (United Kingdom) The goals of Flamingo are (a) to strongly integrate the research of leading European research groups in the area of network and service management, (b) to strengthen the European and worldwide research in this area, and (c) to bridge the gap between scientific research and industrial application.

Our IPv6 traffic keeps growing, reaching new records since the students are back on campus. Even our outgoing traffic is on the rise. Perhaps Jacobs should go ahead and start making their core services (e.g., the official Jacobs web pages) IPv6 ready as well.

We have identified a number of research topics that can be worked on as part of a BSc or MSc thesis. Please consult our thesis topics page for an overview and contact us should you be interested to receive more details.

We are in the process of updating our web pages. We aim at making things more consistent and useful for us and the outside world. One of the new features we added is our new calendar, which can be easily imported into other calendar software. We hope this will make it easier to follow events and deadlines. In order to highlight our activities to improve our pages, we switched to a new theme - wordpress makes all of this remarkably easy.

We planned it for a long time, but now seemed to be the right time, just before IETF 83 in Paris. Out of curiosity, we wanted to visualize the occurrence frequency of the following terms over the years: ["MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", "OPTIONAL"]. Since in majority of cases RFCs represent standards, we were curious to see how the usage of these terms evolved over the years.

There has been a very positive tendency in the amount of traffic shipped over IPv6. Following the winter break, the amount has increased steadily, and its amount is almost three-fold now, compared to the daily averges of summer 2011. The amount of outgoing IPv6 traffic is still, as expected, very low.

Our group applied to participate in the "International IPv6 Application Contest 2011" held by the German IPv6 Council. According to the official page of the Council: "The objectives of this contest are the generation of ideas and applications, which help determine how to introduce IPv6, the Internet of the next generation, on a large scale and use it effectively. The contest also provides an opportunity for the next generation of application developers to gain experience with IPv6.

Almost three months passed since the "World IPv6 Day", and the amount of IPv6 traffic has been almost steady since its first increase on that day.

Our group got a new logo! The design goal was to make it simple, yet reflecting on the keywords of research carried out within the group: "networks" and "distributed". At the same time, the new logo clearly presents the name of the group to the outsider, a feature that the old logo was missing. Our special thanks go to Dmitry Tsoy for being behind the design process of the new logo.

This image shows how the CNDS web pages look like when the content is rendered as a word cloud. This form of "cloud computing" seems to be visually most attractive and it is quite some fun as well. We used http://wordcloud.pagemon.net/ to generate the word cloud image. You can try this online tool easily yourself on other web sites of your personal interest. We found this tool entertaining for a while.