Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

Inria Associate Teams

COMMUNITY

• Title: Message delivery in heterogeneous networks

• Inria principal investigator: Thierry Turletti

• International Partner (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher):

  • University of California Santa Cruz (United States) - School of Engineering - Katia Obraczka

• Duration: 2009 - 2014

• See also: http://inrg.cse.ucsc.edu/community/

• This Inria - UC Santa Cruz Team investigates a number of research challenges raised by message delivery in environments consisting of heterogeneous networks that may be subject to episodic connectivity.

  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. So, in 2012 we 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. In particular, we are designing mechanisms to p rovide flexible, efficient, and secure capacity sharing solutions by leveraging SDN in hybrid networked environments, i.e., environments that consist of infrastructure-based as well as infrastructureless networks. We are also investigating solutions to optimize caching in infrastructure and infrastructureless networks using SDN. We have also designed a content-optimal delivery algorithm, called CODA, for distributing named data over challenged networks.

SIMULBED

• Title: SIMULBED: Large-Scale Simulation Testbed for Realistic Evaluation of Network Protocols and Architectures

• Inria principal investigator: Walid DABBOUS

• International Partner (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher):

  • Keio University (Japan) - Shonan-Fujisawa Campus - Osamu Nakamura

• Duration: 2012 - 2014

• 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 design a platform to make easier the evaluation of network protocols, applications and proposals for the future Internet architecture, and to make this platform available to the networking research community. The SIMULBED evaluation platform aims to conduct easily mixed simulation-experimentation evaluation of networking protocols in a scalable way, while maintaining a high degree of realism and increasing controllability and reproducibility. It is based on the PlanetLab testbed, the ns-3 network simulator and the NEPI unified programming environment developed in our team to help in simplifying the configuration, deployment and run of network scenarios on the platform. Within this collaboration, we are enhancing the support of emulation in the ns-3 network simulator through Direct Code Execution (DCE) and are extending the functionalities of NEPI to fit the needs of SIMULBED. For example, we extended the DCE and NEPI frameworks to conduct easily and in a more reaslitic way evaluation of the CCNx information-centric networking architecture through ns-3 and the PlanetLab testbed.

Inria International Labs

• 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.