Section: Overall Objectives
Overall Objectives
The main objectives of the project are the identification, the conception and the selection of the most appropriate network architectures of a communication service, as well as the development of computing and mathematical tools for the fulfilment of these tasks. These objectives lead to two types of complementary research fields: the systems' qualitative aspects (e.g. protocols' test and design) and the quantitative aspects which are essential to the correct dimensioning of these architectures and the associated services (performance, dependability, Quality of Service, vulnerability and performability evaluation).
The ARMOR project works on problems related to the design and the analysis of communication services. Such services require functionality specifications, decisions about where and how they must be deployed in a system, and the dimensioning of the different components of the system. The interests of the project concern not only particular classes of systems but also methodological aspects.
Concerning the communication systems themselves, we focus mainly on IP networks and our concerns go from architectural aspects to protocols, studying different aspects of the structure of networks and services: from the topological organization of nodes and links to the software techniques allowing the two current versions of the IP protocol (IPv4 and IPv6) to coexist, from the problems related to the development of architectures allowing to provide specific QoS levels, to security or mobility aspects of the IP protocol.
Interoperability testing is essential to ensure that network components interact correctly before they get deployed in a real environment. As such, it is considered as a part of the standardization process. The Armor project contributes in providing solutions (methods, algorithms and tools) which help in obtaining efficient interoperability test suites for new generation networks, mainly IPv6 related protocols.
From the application point of view, our global field is IP enabled technology in general. We are particularly interested in the ``low speed links'' world where QoS aspects are very important and lead to many different and exciting problems (on architectural aspects, on routing, on the protocols themselves). We also have activities in pricing methodologies (a critical area for telecommunications providers, with many defying open problems for the near future), in many areas related to the IPv6 technology, in the integration of packet transmission techniques into the next generations of mobile networks, etc.
Related to the previous remarks are the quantitative aspects of most of those problems. In view of this, we develop techniques for the evaluation of different aspects of the considered systems through models and through measurement techniques . The quantitative aspects we are interested in are performance, dependability, performability, QoS, vulnerability, etc.. The methods we work with go from discrete event simulation and Monte Carlo procedures to analytical techniques, and include numerical algorithms as well. Our main mathematical tools are stochastic processes in general and queuing models and Markov chains in particular, optimization techniques, graph theory, combinatorics, etc. Also in the quantitative evaluation area, we develop a methodology able to quantify the quality of multimedia flows automatically and in a similar fashion as humans do.
