About
This INRIA – UC Santa Cruz Team investigates a number of research challenges raised by message delivery in environments consisting of heterogeneous networks that may be subject to episodic connectivity.
During the first three years of the COMMUNITY associate team, we have explored solutions to enable efficient delivery mechanisms for disruption-prone and heterogeneous networks (i.e. challenged networks). In particular, we have designed the MeDeHa framework along with the HeNNA naming scheme, which allow communication in infrastructure and infrastructure-less networks with varying degrees of connectivity. We have also proposed efficient routing strategies adapted to environment with episodic connectivity that take into account the utility of nodes to relay messages. The various solutions have been evaluated using both simulations and real experimentations in testbeds located at INRIA and UCSC. These solutions have demonstrated good performance in challenged networks. However, the ossification of the Internet prevents the deployment of such solutions in large scale. We have decided to extend our collaboration in two research directions:
- The exploration of the software-defined networking paradigm to facilitate the implementation and large scale deployment of new network architectures to infrastructure-less network environments.
- The design of innovative information-centric communication mechanisms adapted to challenged networks.