Section: Application Domains
Keywords : Extranet, traffic engineering, Internet, Intranet, multimedia, providers, QoS, telecommunications, telephony.
Application Domains
Our main application domains are those related to network design, at both the transport infrastructure and the service levels. Our expertise currently focuses on IP technology in a variety of contexts (IP QoS, IP security, IP mobility, IP telephony,...), and on analysis and dimensioning tools: telecommunications architecture configuration, bottleneck search, resource allocation policies comparison, etc. Our works on protocols and control mechanisms are also applicable to other technologies besides IP, such as ATM.
Problems arising from the coexistence and interoperability of different technologies are also investigated: between IP and ATM, IP and WDM, IPv4 and IPv6, etc. In the field of traffic engineering and system dimensioning, technological evolution also raises a number of new performance evaluation problems. Besides these main application domains, other important subjects where quantitative analysis plays a central role are, for example, the analysis of control mechanisms, or the problems posed by pricing, which are of evident interest for operators. In the IP world, extensions such as mobile IP, cellular IP, security–related aspects, multicasting, and compression techniques (e.g. header compression) are also important application domains.
The first field in which the team's expertise is requested is the area of IP networks. The usual context is that of an industry member who wishes to develop new techniques, or that of a user who has to set up a new communications system or to upgrade (or more generally, modify) an existing one. This may involve a specific aspect of the system (e.g. the costs model which allows the development of a billing policy), or a particular kind of network (for instance, a home-network), or a family of services (for instance, a security policy).
We can also classify ARMOR's main application domains per type of services involved. Then, the past and current expertise of the team's members mainly involve the transport of multimedia flows over IP, the various network QoS management aspects, the testing techniques (interoperability tests, implementation validation tests – especially for IPv6, and test generation). In this context we find, for instance, problems related to the conception of mechanisms well adapted to specific flow types and QoS goals, both at the network access level, and at the intermediary node level.
With regard to analysis and dimensioning, we contribute to the different related methodologies (measurements, simulation, analytical techniques), and also to the development of new mathematical and software tools. We develop models for the collection of specific characteristics of the studied systems (e.g., those related to QoS). We also develop new simulation methodologies, in order to overcome certain limitations of the existing techniques. Finally, it should be noted that networks now offer services with a certain level of redundancy, which leads to problems of reliability. Our team has a long experience in the specific study of this systems' aspect and in related problems such as performability and vulnerability (a notion aiming at quantifying the robustness of a grid without taking into account the reliability of each component).
