As part of its continued collaboration with Asia, INRIA is seeking to strengthen its relations with India, particularly with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). This highly prestigious research organisation is based in Bangalore, a strategic town that is home to key industrial players from the ICST sector, including Microsoft, Philips, France Telecom and Google. An initial team associated with the IISc has recently been selected and INRIA is aiming, in time, to create a joint laboratory with this organisation.
How can mobile terminal
connections be managed on wireless networks to meet the increasing
demand for traffic? Should the choice of technology be left to the
mobile, the network, or a combination of both? Researchers from the MAESTRO project-team and Indian laboratories have been studying this question for several years as part of the Cefipra1 project and, today, this collaboration is continuing in the associate team Dawn.
Researchers in this team are studying and evaluating protocols that
make it possible for mobiles to select the connection point as well as
the technology used, whilst ensuring that the access point can refuse a
new connection in the event of saturation. To this end, they are making
good use of the combined skills in game theory and control theory found
in the Maestro team and those in information and experimentation in the
Anurag Kumar2
team from the IISc (Bangalore). Similarly, expertise in learning
techniques and adaptive control from another member of the associate
team, Vivek Borkar from the Tata institute of fundamental research
(Mumbai), is invaluable when tackling the issue of multihop wireless
networks. In this case, the terminals themselves are used as relays to
send information to other mobiles. It is then a question of developing
and testing a protocol that will make it possible for mobiles to
self-configure and to adapt to the connection context. Finally the
network security aspect is processed with the Saswati Sarkar team from
the university of Pennyslvania, on the basis of work on zero-sum game
theory.
"Collaboration with Indian teams puts us in contact with excellent
students, some of whom are completing their thesis in our team”,
highlights Eitan Altman,
the French coordinator of Dawn. "Moreover, the industrial context in
the Bangalore region is favourable to collaborations since numerous
companies have set up their research laboratories and their development
units in this area.”
1
Cefipra: Franco-Indian centre for the promotion of research, backed by
the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Department of Science
and Technology in the Indian government.
2 A. Kumar is a member of the Indian Academy of Sciences and a IEEE Fellow.
Eitan Altman
MAESTRO project-team, INRIA Sophia-Antipolis - Méditerranée
Tel.: + 33 4 92 38 77 86