In this talk, I'm going to tell the story of how a group of european
researchers arrived at a design for communications software that seems
rather well suited to the new "Data Center Networking" paradigm.
The tale starts with moving from UCL Cambridge and choosing
to learn about ad hoc networks, and then with Intel research lablet
trying out a few disruptive ideas and stumbled on the notion for
Haggle ("Haggle" comes from the phrase
Ad Hoc Google, now really known as Opportunistic Networking)
combining results from Grossglauser & Tse's work on capacity of
multi-hop networks with Kevin Fall's work on Delay Tolerant Networks.
In the process of building various testbeds in the Haggle
project (and three complete versions for native Java phones, C#
on Windows Mobile, and native Android&iPhone versions), as well as
measuring various aspects of human society, we ended up with a system
that appears to be rather more general than expected. Most recently,
for example, it was used to build a P2P secure, disconnect tolerant
version of Dropbox, as well as to track a Flu epidemic.