Section: Research Program
Network Algorithms and Analysis
Based on our scientific foundation on both graph algorithms and distributed algorithms, we plan to analyze the behavior of various networks such as future Internet, social networks, overlay networks resulting from distributed applications or online social networks.
Information Dissemination
One of the key aspects of networks resides in the dissemination of information among the nodes. We aim at analyzing various procedures of information propagation from dedicated algorithms to simple distributed schemes such as flooding. We also consider various models, e.g. where noise can alter information as it propagates or where memory of nodes is limited.
Routing Paradigms
We try to explore new routing paradigms such as greedy routing in social networks for example. We are also interested in content centric networking where routing is based on content name rather than content address. One of our target is multiple path routing: how to design forwarding tables providing multiple disjoint paths to the destination?
Beyond Peer-to-Peer
Based on our past experience of peer-to-peer application design, we would like to broaden the spectrum of distributed applications where new efficient algorithms can be designed and their analysis can be performed. We especially target online social networks as we see them as collaborative tools for exchanging information. A basic question resides in making the right connections for gathering filtered and accurate information with sufficient coverage.
SAT and Forwarding Information Verification
As forwarding tables of networks grow and are sometimes manually modified, the problem of verifying them becomes critical and has recently gained in interest. Some problems that arise in network verification such as loop detection for example, may be naturally encoded as Boolean Satisfiability problems. Beside theoretical interest in complexity proofs, this encoding allows one to solve these problems by taking advantage of the many efficient Satisfiability testing solvers. Indeed, SAT solvers have proved to be very efficient in solving problems coming from various areas (Circuit Verification, Dependency and Conflicts in Software distributions...) and encoded in Conjunctive Normal Form. To test an approach using SAT solvers in network verification, one needs to collect data sets from a real network and to develop good models for generating realistic networks. The technique of encoding and the solvers themselves need to be adapted to this kind of problems. All this represents a rich experimental field of future research.
Network Analysis
Finally, we are interested in analyzing the structural properties of practical networks. This can include diameter computation or ranking of nodes. As we mostly consider large networks, we are often interested in efficient heuristics. Ideally, we target heuristics that give exact answers and are reasonably fast in practice although fast computation time is not guaranteed for all networks. We have already designed such heuristics for diameter computation; understanding the structural properties that enable fast computation time in practice is still an open question.