Section: Overall Objectives

Overall Objectives

A large number of real-world structures and phenomena can be described by networks: separable elements with connections between certain pairs of them. Among such networks, the best known and the most studied in computer science is the Internet. Moreover, the Internet (as the physical underlying network) gives itself rise to many new networks, like the networks of hyperlinks, Internet based social networks, distributed data bases, codes on graphs, local interactions of wireless devices. These huge networks pose exciting challenges for the mathematician and the mathematical theory of networks faces novel, unconventional problems. For example, very large networks cannot be completely known, and data about them can be collected only by indirect means like random local sampling or by monitoring the behavior of various aggregated quantities.

The scientific focus of DYOGENE is on geometric network dynamics arising in communications. By geometric networks we understand networks with a nontrivial, discrete or continuous, geometric definition of the existence of links between the nodes. In stochastic geometric networks, this definition leads to random graphs or stochastic geometric models. A first type of geometric network dynamics is that where the nodes or the links change over time according to an exogeneous dynamics (e.g. node motion and geometric definition of the links). We will refer to this as dynamics of geometric networks below. A second type is that where links and/or nodes are fixed but harbor local dynamical systems (in our case, stemming from e.g. information theory, queuing theory, social and economic sciences). This will be called dynamics on geometric networks. A third type is that where the dynamics of the network geometry and the local dynamics interplay. Our motivations for studying these systems stem from many fields of communications where they play a central role, and in particular: message passing algorithms; epidemic algorithms; wireless networks and information theory; device to device networking; distributed content delivery; social and economic networks.