Networking

Research focus

The Peer review has evaluated this group as Excellent

The recent and present focus addresses the three following areas: Wireless Networks, Multimedia Internet, Broadband Networks
Wireless networks - The evolution of wireless technologies has made wireless networks the most common way to access wired networks. All-wireless networks have emerged as a promising approach for peer-to-peer communications of user devices through the ad-hoc networking paradigm. Several new unsolved problems have attracted research activity. Wireless access networks: The distinctive characteristics of wireless access networks mainly due to radio channel and user mobility have stimulated the research of specific networking solutions. This research group has produced new contributions in this area focusing on the resource sharing mechanism which is one of the issues that has characterized the evolution of cellular systems. Other activities have concentrated on wireless local and metropolitan area networks which constitute alternative technologies to cellular systems. Finally, specific knowledge on optimizations models and algorithms has been exploited in the radio planning problems of different wireless technologies. Ad-hoc networks: Due to radio range limitations, ad-hoc networks consider a multi-hop scenario, where packets are relayed by intermediate terminals to reach their destination. Wireless MESH networking has recently emerged as an “ad-hoc spin-off” aimed at extending and integrating the multi-hop paradigm with more traditional networking. Wireless sensor networks have been proposed as an ideal solution to a large number of applications where an easily deployable network infrastructure is required to collect data from a large set of sensors. Among the many problems brought by these new paradigms this research group has focused on medium access control, routing and resource management. Innovative contributions have been produced to specific application scenarios related to vehicular, sensor and MESH networks.
Multimedia Internet - Internet technologies have become the common platform for providing not only traditional data services but also real-time services for multimedia applications. Today's IPTV and triple-play services are taking off, driving radical changes in the way telecom networks are designed and operated. This requires innovative changes in the entire end-to-end service delivery architecture, to support differentiated requirements for access and transport bandwidth, quality of service guarantees, efficient data transport, network reliability and security. The activities of this group have focused on the problem of providing end-to-end quality of service guarantees to traffic flows, considering in particular resource reservation procedures and traffic control mechanisms that are necessary to offer guaranteed end-to-end performance. Some of the activities have been driven by specific technologies and architectures like Integrated Services, Differentiated Services architectures, and MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching). 131 The extension to multimedia wireless networks of traffic control methodologies creates new problems at the transport layer, especially for the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). In this field, the group’s research focuses on designing advanced transport-layer procedures to make the TCP more robust against outages of the radio segment of end-to-end connections. New research directions that have been added recently to group activities include control and management of fractal traffic, content-based routing in overlay and peer-to-peer networks, coordination of overlay and underlay routing, network security.
Broadband networks - Broadband backbone networks are experiencing a dramatic increase in capacity demand, driven by new bandwidth-hungry Internet. This has lead to a remarkable increase of the number of wavelengths per fiber based on the improvements of optical transmission technologies and to a renewed effort of the research community to design switching devices, protocol architectures and network topologies able to handle such high speed links. Within this framework, the research group has focused on high speed packet switching and circuit switching systems based on both optical and electronic technologies, and on the routing and design methodologies for resilient optical broadband networks. Switching: The main challenges that must be faced when designing high speed switching devices are related to physical switching components, switch architecture, and control mechanisms. In the area of optical switching, the group’s research activity addresses several technological and architectural aspects: design of architectures for optical packet-switching fabrics using several optical-switching, application of network-switching theory to the design of optical cross-connects for circuit-switched communications and performance analysis of optical packet/burst switching networks. In the area of electronic switches, the study concentrated on control mechanisms for multiprocessor. Network design: The research activities in this area have focused on optimization techniques for designing and dimensioning optical networks under static and dynamic traffic demand, taking into account also constraints on reliability in the optical layer. The research approach is based both on accurate modelling of technology constraints and costs and on advanced solution methodologies which have been applied to dimensioning of large-size networks, optical networks design, routing and wavelength assignment.

Departments

Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione (DEI)

Professors

Flaminio Borgonovo (full professor)
Maurizio Decina (full professor)
Luigi Fratta (full professor)
Achille Pattavina (full professor)
Stefano Bregni (associate professor)
Antonio Capone (associate professor)
Paolo Giacomazzi (associate professor)
Luigi Musumeci (associate professor)
Matteo Cesana (assistant professor)
Guido Maier (assistant professor)
Giacomo Verticale (assistant professor)