Section: Contracts and Grants with Industry

Contracts with Industry

Alcatel-Lucent

Participant : Albert Benveniste.

• Title: Laboratoire Commun Alcatel-Lucent BellLabs / Inria

• Type: Laboratoire Commun

• Defi: The Network of the Future

• Duration: January 2008 - January 2012

• Coordinator: Albert Benveniste (Inria) and Olivier Audouin (Alcatel-Lucent BellLabs)

The Joint Bell Labs INRIA Laboratory is the ongoing framework for the overall research cooperation between Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs and INRIA. This joint Laboratory was launched in January 2008, with a 5-year research program. It is a virtual lab, meaning that researchers remain hosted by their home institutions. The lab has the general area of self-organizing networks in its central focus. It is organized into three Actions de Recherche (ADR):

• SelfNets (Self-Organizing networks), headed by Olivier MarcÈ (BellLabs) and Bruno Gaujal (INRIA);

• Semantic Networking, headed by Ludovic Noirie (BellLabs) and Pascale Vicat-Blanc (INRIA);

• High Manageability, HiMa, headed by Pierre Peloso (BellLabs) and Eric Fabre (INRIA, DistribCom).

Overall, the joint lab involves about 50 researchers. It is jointly headed by Olivier Audouin (Bell Labs, president), and Albert Benveniste (INRIA, president of the Scientific Committee). The lab organizes two yearly seminars with progress reports and keynotes by key engineers from Alcatel-Lucent. So far, its production represents 80 papers (21 cosigned), 12 patents and 13 PhDs.

Laboratoire Commun Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs / Inria: ADR HiMa

Participants : Eric Fabre, Albert Benveniste, Claude Jard, Carole Hounkonnou, Aurore Junier.

• Title: High Manageability

• Type: Joint Bell Labs INRIA Laboratory Action de Recherche (ADR)

• Defi: The Network of the Future

• Duration: 5 years

• Coordinator: Eric Fabre (Inria) and Pierre Peloso (Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs)

• Others partners: involves also members of the Madynes team (Loria), and of the Mascotte team (Sophia)

On the Alcatel-Lucent side, this research group involves 5 persons of the PTI group (Packet Transport Infrastructure). The objective of the ADR is to contribute to the autonomic networking trend, that is to design telecommunication networks that would be programmed by objectives, with minimal human operations, and that would then adapt themselves in order to reach these objectives. More specifically, this covers both the architectural and the algorithmic aspects of self-management methodologies. The activity is organised around several case-studies and working groups. The current outcome is of 15 papers, 2 patents  [62] , 3 PhDs.

In the previous years, DistribCom cosigned two joint patents about the distributed optimization of power allocation in photonic networks. In 2011, the team was involved in three main activities.

• The design of graceful shutdown and restart algorithms for the OSPF protocol (patent project). Corresponds to part of Carole Hounkonnou's PhD, started in 2009.

• The study of network stability when protocol parameters are modified, using network calculus techniques (patent project). Corresponds to Aurore Junier's PhD, started in 2010.

• The definition of a methodology for joint network and service self-diagnosis, in IMS/IP architectures. This corresponds to part of Carole Hounkonnou's PhD.

A great part of the activity of this ADR (in particular the last item above) is now hosted within the EU IP UniverSelf (sept. 2010 - sept. 2013).