Section: Overall Objectives

Keywords : Heterogeneous networks, communication protocols, security protocols, multimedia applications, group communication, transmission control, peer-to-peer protocols, traffic measurement, resource localization.

Overall Objectives

The Planète group, located both at INRIA Sophia Antipolis and INRIA Rhône-Alpes research units, conducts research in the domain of networking, with an emphasis on designing, implementing, and evaluating Internet protocols and applications. The main objective of the group is to propose and study new architectures, services and protocols that will enable group and secured communication through the Internet.

Mainly due to to user needs and technological improvements, the Internet witnesses an increased heterogeneity in both the network infrastructure (ATM, satellite, high speed local area networks, wireless LANs, ADSL, Mobile Ad-hoc networks, etc.) and the end hosts (fixed and mobile hosts, PCs with very significant computing capabilities, PDAs or other hand-held devices with limited CPU resources). In the same time, the introduction of new functionalities in the service provided by the inter-network layer is lacking, due to scalable deployment problems. Currently, research problems addressing secured scalable transmission protocols and adaptive mechanisms that can handle both variable network conditions and heterogeneous multimedia applications requirements are becoming crucial.

Our research projects span several areas such as security in infrastructure-less and constrained networks; scalable group communications; impact of heterogeneity on protocol performance; Internet measurement and resource localization; analysis of peer to peer protocols dynamics.

Our research activities are realized in the context of French, European and international collaborations : in particular with several academic (UCL, UCI, UCLA, MIT, UMass, Bern University, ENS, LIP6, Eurecom, INLN, etc.) and industrial (Alcatel, FT R&D, Hitachi, Intel, Motorola, Thales, Thomson Multimédia, STMicroelectronics, etc.) partners.