Focus on a joint research project: COMMUNITY

COMMUNITY (2009-2014)

Message delivery in heterogeneous networks

Principal Investigators :

  • Dr. Thierry Turletti, DIANA project-team, Inria Sophia Antipolis Méditerranée
  • Prof. Katia Obraczka, University of California Santa Cruz

Research objectives:

COMMUNITY has investigated a number of research challenges raised by message delivery in environments consisting of heterogeneous networks with possibly episodic connectivity.

Scientific achievements:

During the first three years, COMMUNITY explored solutions to enable efficient delivery mechanisms for disruption-prone and heterogeneous networks (i.e., challenged networks). This resulted in the MeDeHa framework along with the Henna naming scheme, which allow communication in infrastructure and infrastructureless networks with varying degrees of connectivity. The team also proposed efficient routing strategies adapted to environments with episodic connectivity that take into account the utility of nodes to relay messages. The various solutions have been evaluated using both simulations and real experimentations in testbeds located at Inria and UC Santa Cruz. These solutions have demonstrated good performance in challenged networks. However, the ossification of the Internet prevents the deployment of such solutions in large scale. Following, in 2012, the team pursued its collaboration along two research directions: (i) the design of innovative information-centric communication mechanisms adapted to challenged networks; and (ii) the exploration of the SDN – Software-Defined Network – paradigm to facilitate the implementation and large-scale deployment of new network architectures, to offer innovative services such as capacity sharing.

Publications and Awards:

  • 6 Journal articles
  • 8 Conference papers
  • 5 demos at conferences
  • Open source software for Software-Defined Networking Based Capacity Sharing in Hybrid Networks

Selected publication:

B. Astuto, M.A. S. Santos, B.T. de Oliveira, C.B. Margi, K. Obraczka, and T. Turletti, ”Software- Defined Networking Enabled Capacity Sharing in User Centric Networks”, in IEEE Communication Magazine, Special Issue on UserCentric Networks, IEEE, 52(9) 09/2014.

Follow up:

The expertise gained in SDN by the Inria team has allowed follow-up French ANR projects.