Project : ares
Section: Overall Objectives
Keywords : protocols, hybrid wireless networks, ad hoc networks (ad hoc networks, ad hoc network), services deployment and administration.
Overall Objectives
The goal of the ARES project is to model and develop architectures and software support for hybrid wireless networks. Such networks rely on heterogeneous technologies including Personal Area Networks (PAN) and Wireless Area Networks (WAN) in infrastructure mode and/or in ad hoc mode (i.e. an infrastructure-less mode); they connect people through an increasing number of devices. The main relevant issues concern the interoperability of different systems and protocols and the optimization of radio, network and system resources for services deployment and provisioning. Considering the diversity and variability of the technical and environmental constraints, adaptation is a key to the success of hybrid networks.
ARES focuses on four main challenges: integrating different types of mobility, controlling cross-layer interaction, providing self-configurability and supporting quality of service (QoS).
Cross-layer interaction involves both the radio transmission capabilities of the devices and the elementary services of the middleware environment. Radio transmission capabilities influence the performance of the network. Their impact on the design of new protocols and the adaptation of existing protocols need to be studied through modeling and/or simulation. Despite middleware development is out of the scope of the project, we examine the impact of radio transmission on the specifications of the basic services used by middlewares, namely services discovery, global security, software deployment and terminal supervision.
The project does not cover the development of end-user applications based on context awareness. However, we consider existing usage scenarios in order to derive specifications for the main services provided by an hybrid network. To advance the state of the art in network support for applications, we therefore develop testbeds and experiment with prototypes.
The activities of the project are organized in three areas:
hybrid network modeling;
protocol design;
services deployment and administration.
The four main challenges presented above are transversal to these research areas.
