Section: Application Domains

Panorama

Our main application domains are those related to network design, at both the transport infrastructure and the service levels. Our expertise currently focuses on IP technology in a variety of contexts (IP QoS, IP QoE, IP mobility, ...), and on analysis and dimensioning tools: telecommunications architecture configuration, bottleneck search, resource allocation policies comparison, etc.

We can start by pointing out the PSQA technology we have been developing in the last years (PSQA stands for Pseudo-Subjective Quality Assessment) that allows an automatic and quantitative evaluation of the quality delivered to the user by a network transporting audio or video content. PSQA is accurate (which means that it provides values close to those that would have been obtained using a panel of human observers) and efficient (which means that it can work, if useful or necessary, in real time). Its main application area is in network monitoring: PSQA allows to deploy an auditing system that can continuously analyze the perceived quality at specific points in the network. The other main application area of PSQA is in network control, exploiting the fact that the quality assessment can been done in real time. The first applications of our technique that are currently being explored are in the monitoring and control of networks transporting video flows, with focus on IPTV applications in the context of P2P infrastructures and, more generally, of CDN (Content Delivery Networks), on networks of mobile terminals, on the properties of the SVC codec and their impact on the QoE.

In the field of traffic engineering and system dimensioning, the technological evolution also raises a number of new performance evaluation problems. Besides these main application domains, other important subjects where quantitative analysis plays a central role are, for example, the analysis of control mechanisms, or the problems posed by pricing, which are of evident interest for operators. In the IP world, extensions such as mobile IP, or cellular IP, are also important application domains for our research work.

The first field in which the team's expertise is requested is the area of IP networks. The usual context is that of an industry member who wishes to develop new techniques, or that of a user who has to set up a new communications system or to upgrade (or more generally, modify) an existing one. This may involve a specific aspect of the system (e.g. the costs model which allows the development of a billing policy), or a particular kind of network (for instance, a home-network), or a family of services (for instance, a security policy).

We can also classify our main application domains per type of services involved. The past and current expertise of the team's members mainly involve the transport of multimedia flows over IP, the various network QoS management aspects, the testing techniques associated with the interoperability of network components, etc. In this context we find, for instance, problems related to the conception of mechanisms well adapted to specific flow types and QoS goals, both at the network access level, and at the intermediary node level.

With regard to analysis and dimensioning, we contribute to the different related methodologies (measurements, simulation, analytical techniques), and also to the development of new mathematical and software tools. We develop models for the collection of specific characteristics of the studied systems (e.g., those related to QoS analysis, or to QoE assessment). We also develop new simulation methodologies, in order to overcome certain limitations of the existing techniques. Finally, it should be noted that networks now offer services with a certain level of redundancy, which leads to problems of reliability. Our team has a long experience in the specific study of this systems' aspect and in related problems such as performability and vulnerability (a notion aiming at quantifying the robustness of a network architecture (topology) without taking into account the reliability of each component).