Mobile communications networks have been evolved through multiple technologies over a period of several decades, to a stage that they become very complicated in the context of resource control and management. The heterogeneous next generation mobile network (NGMN) now includes a variety of network technologies and topologies incorporating with one another to provide a wide range of services; operate in a variety of channel conditions and environments; and within a single universal end user device. NGMN will need to be offered as an integrated system, and to promote interoperability among networks, offer global coverage and seamless mobility, enable the use of a universal handheld terminal, and enhance service quality compared to current wired networks. NGMN will be the infrastructure of the true mobile Internet.

Wireless mesh networks are becoming popular alternatives to wireless LANs and for cost-effective use in varied application environments. There are several technical challenges that must be addressed for mesh networking to be as effective as any other form of broadband networking. Much of these challenges relate to multi-hop wireless communication and limited capacity. The goal of this informal presentation is to facilitate further discussions on these challenges.

"ADSL is becoming the standard form of residential and small-business broadband access to the Internet due, primarily, to its low deployment cost. These ADSL residential lines are often deployed with Access Points (AP) that provide wireless connectivity. While the ADSL technology has showed evident limits in terms of capacity, the short-range wireless communication can guarantee a similar or higher capacity. Even more important, it is often possible for a residential wireless client to be in range of several other APs belonging to nearby neighbors with ADSL connections. We introduce ClubADSL, a prototype wireless station that can connect to several multi-frequency APs in range and aggregate their available ADSL bandwidth. ClubADSL achieves a fair bandwidth among the concurrent stations and minimizes the impact of end-to-end latency on the system performance. We show the feasibility of such a system in seamlessly transmitting TCP traffic, and validate its experimental implementation over commodity hardware in controlled scenarios."

Mobility is, without doubt, one of the major new paradigms of the current Internet, and this is driving most of the research activity in networking throughout the World. We are gradually evolving from a network where most end-systems have a fixed or quasi-fixed point of attachment, towards a global network where end systems seamlessly move from network to network and where networks themselves change their connection point to the Internet. In spite of this there is still a long way to go before user and network mobility – at IP level – become a reality, as several technological and research challenges persist.

Normal TCP/IP operation is for the routing system to select a best path that remains stable for some time, and for TCP to adjust to the properties of this path to optimize throughput. A multipath TCP would be able to either use capacity on multiple paths, or dynamically find the best performing path, and therefore reach higher throughput. By adapting to the properties of several paths through the usual congestion control algorithms, a multipath TCP shifts its traffic to less congested paths, leaving more capacity available for traffic that can't move to another path on more congested paths. And when a path fails, this can be detected and worked around by TCP much more quickly than by waiting for the routing system to repair the failure.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Español.  Instructor:  Lugar:  Fecha: 12th May, 2009, 10:00 – 11:00 Organización:   

Some among the most widespread applications of the Internet (real-time streaming multimedia applications) are based on packet exchanges that assume a very low packet delay. In order to offer some form of better service to this kind of traffic some architectural frameworks have been proposed, in which traffic sources obey some form of constraints on the maximum number of packets sent in every time interval, in which traffic is subdivided into classes, and where at any node all packets are served taking only into account the class to which they belong to. For these networks an open issue is their stability, that is the possibility to derive finite bounds to packet delay and queue size at each node.

We study the impact of policies to associate users with base stations/access points on flow-level performance in interference limited wireless networks. Most research in this area has used static interference models (i.e., neighboring base stations are always active) and resorted to intuitive objectives such as load balancing. In this paper, we show that this can be counter productive, and that asymmetries in load can lead to significantly better performance in the presence of dynamic interference which couples the transmission rates experienced by users at various base stations. We propose a methodology that can be used to optimize the performance of a class of coupled systems, and apply it to study the user association problem. We show that by properly inducing load asymmetries, substantial performance gains can be achieved relative to a load balancing policy (e.g., 15 times reduction in mean delay). We present a novel measurement based, interference-aware association policy that infers the degree of interference induced coupling and adapts to it.

This talk will present a brief overview of systems, technologies and applications that are part of Ambient Intelligence (AmI). It is also the purpose of this talk to bring together researchers for inspiring innovation in the evolution of AmI and for answering the question: What are the challenges we need to bet on?