Section: Overall Objectives

Highlights of the Year

• Our paper entitled “I know who you will meet this evening! Linking wireless devices using Wi-Fi probe requests,” got the Best Paper Award – Runner Up, in IEEE International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (IEEE WoWMoM 2012), San Francisco, California, USA.

• After several years of heavy involvement in the IETF activities in the transport and routing areas, four document authored or co-authored by project-team members reached the RFC status in 2012.

  • RFC 6726 (“Standards Track”) is a revision of the RFC 3926 that specifies FLUTE, the application that enables the reliable transmission of multimedia files to a large set of receivers, typically portable devices (smartphones). Over the years FLUTE and the underlying transport protocol, ALC, became key components that are now part of all the wireless Internet standards. This revision benefits from the insight gained by the deployment and usage of these components since 2006.

  • RFC 6584 (“Standards Track”) explains how to use classic authentication and integrity schemes (i.e. group MAC and digital signatures) in the ALC and NORM reliable multicast protocols. All the applications built on top of them, FLUTE for instance, directly benefit from this service.

  • RFC 6816 (“Standards Track”) specifies how to use the LDPC-Staircase AL-FEC codes (that we previously specified in RFC 5170) in the context of FECFRAME, a framework that enables AL-FEC codes to be dynamically and flexibly inserted in communication stacks for improved robustness. The typical use-case is the reliable delivery of multimedia contents in streaming mode. Therefore this RFC 6816 enlarges the fields of application of our LDPC-Staircase codes, initially designed to address file delivery use-cases (e.g. with FLUTE/ALC), to the realtime transmission of contents in streaming mode.

  • RFC 6834 (“Experimental Track”) specifies a mechanism to enforce state consistency between LISP sites by using version numbers in LISP mappings. LISP (Locator/ID Separation Protocol) uses mappings and encapsulation to improve the scalability of Internet routing and data-centers. This RFC is an enabler for fast and scalable resiliency and mobility techniques in LISP but also for state consistency in complex LISP (e.g., large datacenters).