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Section: Partnerships and Cooperations
International Initiatives
Inria Associate Teams
COMMUNITY
International Partner (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher):
See also: http://inrg.cse.ucsc.edu/community/
During the first three years of the COMMUNITY associate team, we have explored solutions to enable efficient delivery mechanisms for disruption-prone and heterogeneous networks (i.e. challenged networks). In particular, we have designed the MeDeHa framework along with the Henna naming scheme, which allow communication in infrastructure and infrastructure-less networks with varying degrees of connectivity. We have also proposed efficient routing strategies adapted to environment with episodic connectivity that take into account the utility of nodes to relay messages. The various solutions have been evaluated using both simulations and real experimentations in testbeds located at Inria and UCSC. These solutions have demonstrated good performance in challenged networks. However, the ossification of the Internet prevents the deployment of such solutions in large scale. We have decided to extend our collaboration in two research directions: (1) the exploration of the software-defined networking paradigm to facilitate the implementation and large scale deployment of new network architectures to infrastructure-less network environments; and (2) the design of innovative information-centric communication mechanisms adapted to challenged networks.
SIMULBED
Title: SIMULBED: Large-Scale Simulation Testbed for Realistic Evaluation of Network Protocols and Architectures
International Partner (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher):
See also: http://planete.inria.fr/Simulbed
Simulators and experimental testbeds are two different approaches for the evaluation of network protocols and they provide a varying degree of repeatability, scalability, instrumentation and realism. Network simulators allow fine grained control of experimentation parameters, easy instrumentation and good scalability, but they usually lack realism. However, there is a growing need to conduct realistic experiments involving complex cross-layer interactions between many layers of the communication stack and this has led network researchers to evaluate network protocols on experimental testbeds.
The use of both simulators and testbeds to conduct experiments grants a better insight on the behavior of the evaluated network protocols and applications. In this project, we focus on the design of SIMULBED, an experimentation platform that aims to provide the best of both worlds. Our project builds on the following state-of-the-art tools and platforms: the open source ns-3 network simulator and the PlanetLab testbed. ns-3 is the first network simulator that includes a mechanism to execute directly within the simulator existing real-world Linux protocol implementations and applications. Furthermore, it can be used as a real-time emulator for mixed (simulation-experimentation) network scenarios. PlanetLab is the well-known international experimental testbed that supports the development and the evaluation of new network services. It is composed of nodes connected to the Internet across the world, and uses container-based virtualization to allow multiple experiments running independently on the same node while sharing its resources.
The overall objective of the project is to make available to networking research community, the SIMULBED platform that will: (1) allow to conduct easily mixed simulation-experimentation evaluation of networking protocols and (2) scale up the size of the PlanetLab experimental testbed, while maintaining a high degree of realism and increasing controllability and reproducibility. We will use the NEPI unified programming environment recently developed in the Planète project-team to help in simplifying the configuration, deployment and run of network scenarios on the platform.
CLOUDY
Title: Secure and Private Distributed Data Storage and Publication in the Future Internet
International Partners (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher):
See also: http://planete.inrialpes.fr/cloudy-associated-team/
Cloud computing is a form of computing where general purpose clients (typically equipped with a web browser) are used to access resources and applications managed and stored on a remote server. Cloud applications are increasingly relied upon to provide basic services like e-mail clients, instant messaging and office applications. The customers of cloud applications benefit from outsourcing the management of their computing infrastructure to a third-party cloud provider. However, this places the customers in a situation of blind trust towards the cloud provider. The customer has to assume that the "cloud" always remains confidential, available, fault-tolerant, well managed, properly backed-up and protected from natural accidents as well as intentional attacks. An inherent reason for today's limitations of commercial cloud solutions is that end users cannot verify that servers in the cloud and the network in between are hosting and disseminating tasks and content without deleting, disclosing or modifying any content. This project seeks to develop novel technical solutions to allow customers to verify that cloud providers guarantee the confidentiality, availability and fault-tolerance of the stored data and infrastructure.
Participation In International Programs
CIRIC: Our project-team was involved in the definition of the topics for the Network and Telecom R&D line of the (the Communication and Information Research and Innovation Center - CIRIC), the Inria research and innovation centre in Chili. In this context, we will extend our collaboration with Universidad Diego Portales, Chile.