Section: Overall Objectives

New challenges

The Internet has steadily evolved over the past decades from a small homogeneous to a gigantic Internet of Things (IoT) interconnecting an extremely wide variety of machines (e.g., PCs, smart-phones, sensors/actuators, smart appliances, smart vehicles), and providing an extremely wide variety of services. Globally, devices and connections are growing faster than both the population and Internet users, as foreseen by Cisco. Forecasts mention an IoT market that will attain a compound annual growth rate of 28.5% from 2016 to 2020 as well as an installed base of IoT devices over 75.4B devices by 2025. Added to these statistics is the fact that global mobile data traffic will grow nearly twice as fast as fixed IP traffic from 2017 to 2022: Smartphones account for most of this growth.

Hence, the edge of this network now consists in a dense deployment of machines ranging from PCs to smartphones, from sensors/actuators to smart appliances, and from smart vehicles to diverse kinds of robots. As a consequence, humans are immersed in a highly connected and ubiquitous cyber-physical context, and as end-users of the network and its numerous services, their satisfaction has become the main focus.

In this context, the IoT is simultaneously used as a tool to gather more data, and as a mean to automate more advanced control. Some businesses and institutions aim to gather more data to better understand their customers, so as to improve services. Others efforts aim to further immerse their customers into a flourishing, integrated cyber-physical environment, which can automatically and optimally adapts to their needs. All these emerging IoT-related opportunities bring new requirements and consequently, new scientific and technological challenges to the edge of the Internet.

First, the densified deployment of heterogeneous low-end IoT devices (e.g. sensors, actuators, etc.) at the edge of the Internet requires to deal with (1) the accommodation of machines with extremely limited capabilities, with a primary focus on low power requirements while (2) allowing their seamless integration in interoperable systems (often using IP as a common factor).

Second, today's pervasiveness of high-end IoT devices (e.g. smart handheld devices) distribute increasing capabilities (i.e., processing, storage, connectivity) at the edge of the network, and make our real life and virtual activities seamlessly merged together. In this domain, we need a better understanding of: (1) when, where, and for what the high-end IoT devices are used, (2) how the uses vary among individuals, and (3) how social norms and structure dictating individuals' behavior influence the way they interact with network services and demand resources.

The research contributions of the team aims thus, at dealing with such requirements and challenges brought to the edge of the Intenet. One should design adequate algorithms and communication mechanisms for addressing such challenges as well as for leveraging the new technological opportunities brought by the Internet of Things.