Section: Overall Objectives

Introduction

The Planète group, located both at INRIA Sophia Antipolis - Méditerranée and INRIA Grenoble - Rhône-Alpes research centers, conducts research in the domain of networking, with an emphasis on designing, implementing, and evaluating Internet protocols and applications. The main objective of the group is to propose and study new architectures, services and protocols that will enable efficient and secured communication through the Internet.

The Internet is a huge success: its scale has increased by several orders of magnitude. In order to cope with such growth, the simple, original Internet architecture has accreted several hundred additional protocols and extensions. Networks based upon this significantly more complex architecture are increasingly difficult to manage in a way that enables the qualities of service delivered to meet the needs of the over 1 billion users.

The increasing, and implicit, reliance on the Internet has stimulated a major debate amongst experts as to whether the current architecture and protocols can continue to be patched, or whether it will collapse under the demands of future applications. There are signs that the current suite of protocols and solutions are becoming inadequate to cope with some common Internet trends: mobility of users and devices, unusual but legitimate traffic load (e.g. flash crowds), large heterogeneity in terms of devices' capabilities and service features, delivery of real-time high-bandwidth video services, requirements for episodic connectivity, scalability in terms of number of nodes and users, complexity related to network, service and security management.

Additionally, the original Internet was designed and built in an era of mutual trust, probably due to the small size of the "ARPANet" research community. Many of the protocol additions/extensions have been to retrofit protection mechanisms that are required in the current Internet environment, which does not merit mutual trust. The volume and types of attempts to subvert the Internet will continue to increase, further stressing the current architecture. Current solutions for security are added a posteriori as a patch to overcome the limitations encountered, instead of being embedded in the system functionality.

Furthermore, mobile network hosts are rapidly becoming the norm for the devices with which users access the Internet. An increasing number of the protocol additions/extensions have been needed to retrofit support for mobility into the (initially wireline-focussed) Internet architecture. The growing use of mobile sensors will continue to drive the need for solid mobility support in the architecture (and the efficient transfer of small data units).

The Planète project-team addresses some of these problems related to both (global) architectural and (specific) protocol aspects of the future Internet. Our research directions span several areas such as data-centric architectures; network security; network monitoring and network evaluation platforms.

Our research activities are realized in the context of French, European and international collaborations: in particular with several academic (UCLA, Berkeley, UCSC, Princeton U., U. Washington, UC Irvine, NYU, NICTA, ICT-CAS (China), Concordia U., KTH, CASED, TUB, Cambridge, U. Bari, U. Diego Portales, U. Berne, EPFL, U. Pisa, RPI, ENSI (Tunis), LIP6, Eurecom, Univ. de Savoie, INSA Lyon, Ensimag, University de Rennes, etc.) and industrial (Ericsson, Nokia, SUN, Docomo, Expway, Alcatel, Orange R&D, Coronis, STMicroelectronics, Motorola, Technicolor, Netcelo, NEC, Boeing, etc.) partners.