Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Internet users are increasingly using interactive services such as multimedia messaging, social networks (e.g., facebook, myspace), sharing (e.g., torrents) and collaborative applications (e.g., wiki pages). Emerging services (e.g. telemedicine or telepresence) are also gaining popularity. Simultaneously, Internet users are becoming more and more mobile, and are growingly interested in maintaining full access to their services mix while on the go. Together, these developments are straining current architectures for service delivery in wireless and mobile networks, which were not designed to handle large and highly variable information transfer, accommodate dynamic mobility and employ isolated service management platform. They are also mostly static and impersonal in their management as they do not adapt to individual user requirements, habits or surroundings. The objective of this proposed research is to promptly provide the Canadian telecommunications sector (service providers, service developers, vendors) with wireless and mobile networks that enable the realization of future mobile Internet. The project, involving collaboration with Nortel Networks, comprises three complementary components. The first aims at establishing means to seamlessly combine different wireless access technologies and structures, in addition to different service deployment and management platforms. The second component aims at establishing design and operation guidelines of robust and opportunistic networks that can handle the highly dynamic requirements of future services and their QoS while exploiting variations in network and medium conditions. The third component is to instill - by design - adaptability in wireless and mobile service delivery by increasing awareness to user's context, location and environment, and facilitating collaborative and peer-to-peer applications over wireless. The research will result in cost-efficient, profitable and capable architectures for service deployment, management and delivery that will ensure and consumer satisfaction.