Section: Overall Objectives

Peer-to-peer computing and wireless autonomic networks

In this area, we are investigating the use of peer-to-peer algorithms in wireless autonomic networked systems. At the moment, this research area is essentially studied by the network community, although many of these issues are common to the ones encountered in distributed computing such as information propagation, resource discovery, etc.

Wireless autonomic networks and peer-to-peer networks exhibit many similarities that are worth leveraging. Scale and dynamicity are among the most striking ones. The need for scalability prevents the use of any form of centralization. The dynamic nature of such networks imposes to design self-organizing solutions to be able to support churn, disconnection, mobility etc. . However, wireless network specificities imply major adaptations of Internet-based peer-to-peer algorithms. More specifically, the fact that the neighbourhood of a node is entirely fixed by the physical network topology, the necessity to take into account the energy consumption, and the broadcast property of the radio communication of wireless nodes have a strong impact on the algorithm design. This recent research area allows us to leverage our peer-to-peer expertise in another application domain with specific applications.