Section: Research Program

Research Program

Members of Coati have a good expertise in the design and management of wired and wireless backbone, backhaul, broadband, and complex networks. On the one hand, we cope with specific problems such as energy efficiency in backhaul and backbone networks, routing reconfiguration in connection oriented networks (MPLS, WDM), traffic agregation in SONET networks, compact routing in large-scale networks, survivability to single and multiple failures, etc. These specific problems often come from questions of our industrial partners. On the other hand, we study fondamental problems mainly related to routing and reliability that appear in many networks (not restricted to our main fields of applications) and that have been widely studied in the past. However, previous solutions do not take into account the constraints of current networks/traffic such as their huge size and their dynamics. Coati thus puts a significant research effort in the following directions:

• Energy efficiency at both the design and management levels. More precisely, we plan to develop accurate modeling of the power consumption of various parts and components of the networks through measurement done in collaboration with industrial partners (Alcatel-Lucent, 3Roam, Orange labs, etc.). Then, we shall propose new designs of the networks and new routing algorithms in order to lower the power consumption.

• Larger networks: Another challenge one has to face is the increase in size of practical instances. It is already difficult, if not impossible, to solve practical instances optimally using existing tools. Therefore, we will have to find new ways to solve problems using reduction and decomposition methods, characterization of polynomial instances (which are surprisingly often the practical ones), or algorithms with acceptable practical performances.

• Stochastic behaviors: Larger topologies mean frequent changes due to traffic and radio fluctuations, failures, maintenance operations, growth, routing policy changes, etc. We aim at including these stochastic behaviors in our combinatorial optimization process to handle the dynamics of the system and to obtain robust designs of networks.