Section: Scientific Foundations

Scientific foundations

The increased network heterogeneity raises new research topics. In this context, our project is interested in the issues related to group communications and security protocols in particular and in enhanced performance communications protocols in general. Based on a practical view, our approach is to design new communication protocols or mechanisms, to implement and to evaluate them either by simulation or by experimentation on real network platforms (such as VTHD and PlanetLab). Our work includes a substantial technological component since we implement our mechanisms in pre-operational systems and we also develop applications that integrate the designed mechanisms as experimentation and demonstration tools. We work in close collaboration with research and development industrial teams.

In addition to our experimentation and deployment specificities, we closely work with researchers from various domains to broaden the range of techniques we can apply to networks. In particular, we apply techniques of the information and queuing theories to evaluate the performance of protocols and systems. We also apply technique of non-linear systems to understand the dynamics of computer network protocols. The collaboration with physicists and mathematicians is, from our point of view, a promising approach to find solutions that will build the future of the Internet.

In order to carry out our approach as well as possible, it is important to attend and contribute the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) and other standardization bodies meetings on a regular basis, in order to propose and discuss our ideas in the working groups related to our topics of interests.