Energy efficiency is one of the great technological challenges of our times. Recently, the concerns for the environmental consequences of the huge rate with which energy is consumed is leading to the awareness that electricity consumption and waste should be reduced in all sectors. The ICT (Information and Communication Technology) sector makes no exception, since it is becoming a major component of the worldwide energy consumption budget.

It is notoriously difficult to make distributed systems reliable. This becomes even harder in the case of the widely-deployed systems that are heterogeneous (multiple implementations) and federated (multiple administrative entities).

Nicolas Georganas received the Dip. Ing. (Diplom-Ingenieur - German equivalent of M.Sc. degree) in Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (Athens, Greece) in 1966. He went on to achieve his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (Summa cum Laude) in 1970 from the University of Ottawa (Ottawa, Canada). In 2004, he was conferred a Dr-Ing. (Doktor Ingenieur) (honoris causa) in Electrical Engineering by the Technische Universität Darmstadt (Darmstadt, Germany). In 2007, he was awarded his second Ph.D. (honoris causa) in Electrical and Computer Engineering by the National Technical University of Athens. He currently holds the position of Distinguished University Professor in the School of Information Technology and Engineering (SITE) of the University of Ottawa. In addition to this, he is also a Visiting Researcher at IMDEA Networks and a Cátedra de Excelencia at University Carlos III of Madrid (UC3M). In 1986 he became the Founding Dean of the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Engineering, and from 2005-08 served as Associate Vice-President, Research (External).

​The use of centralized mobility management approaches – such as Mobile IPv6 – poses some difficulties to operators of current and future networks, due to the expected large number of mobile users and their exigent demands. All this has triggered the need for distributed mobility management alternatives, that alleviate operators’ concerns allowing for cheaper and more efficient network deployments.

This work, using a game-theoretic approach, considers Internet-based computations, where a master processor assigns, over the Internet, a computational task to a set of untrusted worker processors, and collects their responses. The master must obtain the correct task result, while maximizing its benefit. Building on prior work, we consider a framework where altruistic, malicious, and rational workers co-exist. In addition, we consider the possibility that the communication between the master and the workers is not reliable, and that workers could be unavailable; assumptions that are very realistic for Internet-based master-worker computations.

Efficient vehicle-to-Internet routing and address autoconfiguration are two of the missing pieces required to provide Internet connectivity from vehicles. Here, we propose TREBOL, a tree-based and configurable protocol which benefits from the inherent tree-shaped nature of vehicle to Internet traffic to reduce the signaling overhead while dealing efficiently with the vehicular dynamics.

In the talk I overview some recent results for optimization problems that originate in optical networks. They deal with optimizing the utilization of regenerators (switching components that regenerate a signal after a certain distance) and ADMs (Add-Drop Multiplexers).

On Sep 26th and 27th we organize a meeting of the EU project TREND. The research conducted in this project is in the field of energy efficient networking. The second day of the project is dedicated to several research talks by members of the project as well as some external speakers. Those interested in attending to these sessions are welcome to do so. The only requirement is to complete the registration form by Thursday, September 22nd

Already a popular application in the Internet, IPTV is becoming, among the service providers, a preferred alternative to conventional Broadcasting technologies. Since many of the existing deployments have been done within the safe harbor of telcos own networks, IP multicast has been the desired streaming solution. However, previous studies showed that the popularity of the TV channels follows the Pareto principle, with the bulk of TV channels being watched only by a small fraction of viewers. Recognizing the potential scalability issues, we believe that multicast streaming approach may not be desirable for unpopular TV channels, especially when there are many such channels in the provider's service package. For this reason, the peer-to-peer content distribution paradigm is seen as an alternative, in particular for non-popular content. In order to analyze its viability, in this paper we perform a comparative analysis between IP multicast and a peer-to-peer overlay using unicast connections as streaming approaches, in the context of channels with different degrees of popularity. Our findings show that while multicast is always more efficient in terms of bandwidth utilization, peer-to-peer has a comparable performance for unpopular channels with a low number of viewers.

The first Workshop on "far out" research ideas of the institute is to be held on December 17th, 2010. The purpose of the first edition of this series of workshops is to have researchers from the institute present very innovative ideas that could lead to internal projects or even the offspring of a full line of research. The sessions encourage brain-storming around the ideas presented, in order to help give them shape and evaluate their potential.