Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

ANR

• Equipex FIT (Futur Internet of Things) FIt is one of 52 winning projects in the Equipex research grant program. It will set up a competitive and innovative experimental facility that brings France to the forefront of Future Internet research. FIT benefits from 5.8€¨ million grant from the French government Running from 22.02.11 – 31.12.2019. The main ambition is to create a first-class facility to promote experimentally driven research and to facilitate the emergence of the Internet of the future.

• As proposed by initiatives in Europe and worldwide, enabling an open, general-purpose, and sustainable large-scale shared experimental facility will foster the emergence of the Future Internet. There is an increasing demand among researchers and production system architects to federate testbed resources from multiple autonomous organisations into a seamless/ubiquitous resource pool, thereby giving users standard interfaces for accessing the widely distributed and diverse collection of resources they need to conduct their experiments. The F-Lab project builds on a leading prototype for such a facility: the OneLab federation of testbeds. OneLab pioneered the concept of testbed federation, providing a federation model that has been proven through a durable interconnection between its flagship testbed PlanetLab Europe (PLE) and the global PlanetLab infrastructure, mutualising over five hundred sites around the world. One key objective of F-Lab is to further develop an understanding of what it means for autonomous organisations operating heterogeneous testbeds to federate their computation, storage and network resources, including defining terminology, establishing universal design principles, and identifying candidate federation strategies. On the operational side, F-Lab will enhance OneLab with the contribution of the unique sensor network testbeds from SensLAB, and LTE based cellular systems. In doing so, F-Lab continues the expansion of OneLab's capabilities through federation with an established set of heterogeneous testbeds with high international visibility and value for users, developing the federation concept in the process, and playing a major role in the federation of national and international testbeds. F-Lab will also develop tools to conduct end-to-end experiments using the OneLab facility enriched with SensLAB and LTE.

  F-Lab is a unique opportunity for the French community to play a stronger role in the design of federation systems, a topic of growing interest; for the SensLAB testbed to reach an international visibility and use; and for pioneering testbeds on LTE technology.

• ANR RESCUE started in December 2010: Access and metropolitan networks are much more limited in capacity than core networks. While the latter operate in over-provisioning mode, access and metropolitan networks may experience high overload due to evolution of the traffic or failures. In wired networks, some failures (but not all) are handled by rerouting the traffic through a backup network already in place. In developed countries, backup networks are adopted wherever possible (note that this is generally not the case for the links between end users and their local DSLAM). Such a redundant strategy may not be possible in emerging countries because of cost issues. When dedicated backup networks are not available, some operators use their 3G infrastructure to recover some specific failures; although such an alternative helps avoid full network outage, it is a costly solution. Furthermore, availability of 3G coverage is still mainly concentrated in metropolitan zones. When no backup networks are available, it would be interesting to deploy, for a limited time corresponding to the period of the problem (i.e., failure or traffic overload), a substitution network to help the base network keep providing services to users.

  In the RESCUE project (2010-2013), we investigate both the underlying mechanisms and the deployment of a substitution network composed of a fleet of dirigible wireless mobile routers. Unlike many projects and other scientific works that consider mobility as a drawback, in RESCUE we use the controlled mobility of the substitution network to help the base network reduce contention or to create an alternative network in case of failure. The advantages of an on-the-fly substitution network are manifold: Reusability and cost reduction; Deployability; Adaptability.

  The RESCUE project addresses both the theoretical and the practical aspects of the deployment of a substitution network. From a theoretical point of view, we will propose a two-tiered architecture including the base network and the substitution network. This architecture will describe the deployment procedures of the mobile routing devices, the communication stack, the protocols, and the services. The design of this architecture will take into account some constraints such as quality of service and energy consumption (since mobile devices are autonomous), as we want the substitution network to provide more than a best effort service. From a practical point of view, we will provide a proof of concept, the architecture linked to this concept, and the necessary tools (e.g., traffic monitoring, protocols) to validate the concept and mechanisms of on-the-fly substitution networks. At last but not least, we will validate the proposed system both in laboratory testbeds and in a real-usage scenario.

  http://rescue.lille.inria.fr/

• ANR PETAFLOW (Appel Blanc International) started in march 2010 and ended in october 2013. It is a collaborative project between the GIPSA Lab (Grenoble), MOAIS (Inria Grenoble), DANTE (Inria Grenoble), the University of Osaka (the Cybermedia Center and the Department of Information Networking) and the University of Kyoto (Visualisation Laboratory).

  The aim of this collaboration was to propose network solutions to guarantee the Quality of Service (in terms of reliability level and of transfer delay properties) of a high speed, long-distance connection used in an interactive, high performance computing application. Another specificity of this application was the peta-scale volume of the treated data corresponding to the upper airway flow modelling.

  http://petaflow.gforge.inria.fr/

• ANR CONTINT CODDDE accepted in December 2013: It is a collaborative project between the ComplexNetwork team at LIP6/UPMC; Linkfluence and Inria Dante. The CODDDE project aims at studying critical research issues in the field of real-world complex networks study:

  • How do these networks evolve over time?

  • How does information spread on these networks?

  • How can we detect and predict anomalies in these networks?

  In order to answer these questions, an essential feature of complex networks will be exploited: the existence of a community structure among nodes of these networks. Complex networks are indeed composed of densely connected groups of that are loosely connected between themselves.

  The CODDE project will therefore propose new community detection algorithms to reflect complex networks evolution, in particular with regards to diffusion phenomena and anomaly detection.

  These algorithms and methodology will be applied and validated on a real-world online social network consisting of more than 10 000 blogs and French media collected since 2009 on a daily basis (the dataset comprises all published articles and the links between these articles).

• ANR FETUSES: The goals of this ANR project consist in the development of statistical signal processing tools dedicated to per partum fetal heat rate characterisation and acidosis detection, and are organised as follows: $-$ construction of a large dataset of per partum fetal heart rate recordings, which is well documented and of significant clinical value; $-$ Developments of adaptive (e.g. data driven) algorithms to separate data into trend (deceleration induced by contractions) and fluctuation (cardiac variability) components; $-$ Developments of algorithms to characterise the non stationary and multifractal properties of per partum fetal heart rate ; $-$ Acidosis detection and assessment using the large datasets; $-$ Algorithm implementation for performing tests in real clinical situations. ANR is a joint project between DANTE, the Physics Lab of ENS Lyon (SiSyPhe team) and the Hôpital Femme-Mère-Enfant of Bron (Lyon). Fetuses started in january 2012.

• ANR INFRA DISCO (DIstributed SDN COntrollers for rich and elastic network services) project: the DANTE team will explore the way SDN (Software Designed Network) can change network monitoring, control, urbanisation and abstract description of network resources for the optimisation of services. More specifically, the team will address the issues regarding the positioning of SDN controllers within the network, and the implementation of an admission control that can manage IP traffic prioritisation.