Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

The traditional telecommunications infrastructure robustness is diminishing because of two elements: the increased use of wireless technologies that, by its nature, are more vulnerable than wireline, and the convergence towards IP, which was designed with a "best-effort" philosophy in mind. There are obvious management advantages to this approach but it is almost certain that the reliability of this integrated system will suffer from the inadequacies of both wireless and Internet technology. This may not be a particularly pressing problem for the casual home user, but it could be very important for users that would pay to expect reliability and Quality of Service. It would be also extremely important in emergencies situations, where even if a failure did not affect directly the system, there would be a large surge of traffic. In this case, the network may be overloaded and it may happen that no communications can be relayed as it happened in recent events. These are very serious problems that have to be addressed as soon as possible before the wireless/Internet convergence is complete. In this project, we examine how some techniques currently proposed provide some forms of service guarantees in the wired Internet that can be used to improve robustness. An additional difficulty is that these techniques must be made to work with wireles technology, a problem that has not been examined so far. This is very important since in a few years, we could have a completely Internet-based network with a large population of wireless users. It could very well happen that in an emergency situation, none of these users, including relief and security workers, could access the network, because of the general overload caused by the emergency. This is clearly not an option and that is why we want to start right now to look at these issues.