Thematic Research Areas
Communications Infrastructure
Future communication infrastructures will consist of many different
networks. The challenge is to provide the enabling technology needed to offer seemlessly integrated services over these networks, and to provide the user with a transparent interface to the system regardless of her actual physical connection. Enabling the convergence of heterogenous networks and building a reliable infrastructure, tolerant to subsystem failures, is therefore critical.
Distributed Management
The focus of this area is Network Architectures, Algorithms, Performance, and Security (NAAPS). Its activities center around odeling/design/analysis of architectures, algorithms, performance, and security mechanisms of networked systems. The work combines theoretical studies with experimentation. Investigations are carried out in the context of future Internet, sensor networks, network/cloud services, mobile information systems and social networks.
The research is lead by faculty including Erik Aurell (CB), Mads Dam (TCS), Gunnar Karlsson (LCN), Rolf Stadler (LCN), Sonja Buchegger (TCS), György Dán (LCN), Viktoria Fodor (LCN), Supriya Krishnamurthy (CB), and post docs including Alberto Gonzalez (LCN) and Emre Altug Yavuz (LCN).
Networked Services
The increasing complexity of computing systems and communication networks is starting to overwhelm the engineers and system administrators who design and manage these systems. As communication systems grow more complex, become larger and mission-critical, their requirements towards high reliability and availability increase, and so do their operating costs. Maintenance has become the dominant cost factor for most networked systems, may they be cellular networks or IT environments.
Signals and Systems Theory
In the future much of the signal processing in sensor networks will have to be done in a decentralized way. More precisely, sensors (video cameras, chemical sensors, for instance) will be intelligent and perform preprocessing of measurement data instead of transmitting raw data over a bandwidth and power consuming link to a central processing unit in the network. There are many reasons for this trend. One is that the number of sensors and the amount of data they generate grows fast. Another is that decentralization in itself is a system design methodology, to achieve modularity and to increase reliability by reducing explicit dependence on a few central nodes.
