Summary (in French): Stratégies émergeantes pour les réseaux de communication sans fil (Emerging Strategies for Wireless Communication Networks)

Tandis qu’un grand nombre des défis de base des réseaux sans fil ont été adressés avec succès, la demande croissante de trafic sur un spectre de fréquence radio limité a entrainé une reconsidération de la manière utilisée pour partager cette ressource. Par conséquent, un domaine émergeant de recherche est celui du partage dynamique de la bande passante, domaine sur lequel nous travaillerons. L’autre thème que nous aborderons est celui des réseaux multi-saut sans fil (connus sous le nom de réseaux ad hoc). En particulier, nous nous intéresserons aux sujets émergeants tels que les communications coopératives, le codage réseau, ordonnancement dynamique distribué de paquets, ainsi que des modèles précis de réseaux maillés d’accès aléatoires maillés. Nous explorerons des techniques issues de la théorie des jeux coopératifs et non-coopératifs et des jeux dynamiques évolutionnaires afin de modéliser le partage des ressources dans les réseaux sans fil. Finalement, nous proposons d’utiliser des modèles de continuum des routes pour étudier les limites des réseaux denses ad hoc.
See: the detailed proposal
proposal for second year.
proposal for third year.

Next text is taken from the "Inedit" magazine No. 63.

Bangalore: managing connections on wireless networks

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.

Contact:

Eitan Altman
MAESTRO project-team, INRIA Sophia-Antipolis - Méditerranée
Tel.: + 33 4 92 38 77 86