The 2021 edition of the REDIMadrid Conference has been completely virtual due to COVID-19, but efforts have been joined to make the day very interesting and shorter to continue attracting a very determined audience.

Manuel Carro, Director of IMDEA Software Institute, opened the conference with a brief introduction and gave way to Ana Isabel Cremades, Director General of Research and Technological Innovation of the [Madrid Regional Government], who was in charge of the opening speech of the day together with Manuel Carro.

Manuel and Ana spoke about the origin of the network as well as the high speed networks to offer services to the educational and scientific community. In this sense, he stated that teleworking, forced by the emergence of the pandemic, would not have been possible without fiber optic networks such as REDIMadrid.

“The State of REDIMadrid. Present and Future” was the first presentation, given by César Sánchez, Director of REDIMadrid and Associate Research Professor at the IMDEA Software Institute, in which he stated that REDIMadrid is the last mile of the RedIRIS network in Madrid as part of the European GEANT network. He talked about the evolution of REDIMadrid in the coming years alluding to the new quantum network of the Madrid Regional Government, MADQCI.

David Rincón, coordinator of REDIMadrid, spoke about the Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in the educational environment that originated the tender of a software to mitigate these attacks. The mitigation of traffic is done before it reaches the institutions, therefore, the network clients are protected. He also commented on the data of the new tool that will be put into service during 2022, REDIFoD.

The next presentation: “Hybrid recommender system for audiovisual resources”, was given by José Antonio Ledesma, a computer engineer with studies focused on computing. The work he presented has been developed as a final degree project at UNED under the direction of Professor Covadonga Rodrigo and subsequently has been professionally integrated into the UNED Play solution thanks to a grant in collaboration with the INTECCA team in Ponferrada.

Then, Wifredo Aragón gave his talk “New 100Gbps network of the UPM” in which he told the audience how the UPM network got to a connection with a capacity of 100Gbps.

The day continued with the talk “The Lockdown Effect: Implications of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Internet Traffic”, based on a publication authored by Juan Tapiador, Professor of Computer Science at UC3M, and Narseo Vallina-Rodríguez, Research Assistant Professor at IMDEA Networks Institute. REDIMadrid contributed to this study by providing traffic data.

Juan Quemada, from the UPM, presented the free software projects derived from the Isabel application, where projects have been developed, such as the MCU WebRTC Linckya/Licode or the Plato SAGA project.

Finally, came the block of talks of the manufacturers, in which Telefónica, Juniper Networks and Palo Alto participated. Each of them presented a paper focused on their business, Telefónica Evidence-based management and digital twin, Juniper presented its product Wifi MIST and Palo Alto talked about SASE.