Section: Research Program

Research Directions

Maestro 's research directions belong to five main themes motivated by direct applications: network science, wireless networks, network engineering games, green networking and smart grids, content-oriented systems. These directions are very connected: network engineering games find applications in many networking fields, from wireless protocols to applications such as social networks. Green IT studies are often concerned with wireless networks, etc. The study of these applications often raises questions of methodological nature, less close to direct applications; these advances are reported in a separate section.

Network Science

Maestro contributes to this new fast growing research subject. “Network Science” or “Complex Network Analysis” aims at understanding the structural properties and the dynamics of a variety of large-scale networks in telecommunications (e.g. the graph of autonomous systems, the Web graph), social science (e.g. community of interest, advertisement, reputation, recommendation systems), bibliometrics (e.g. citations, co-authors), biology (e.g. spread of an epidemic, protein-protein interactions), and physics. It has been observed that the complex networks encountered in these areas share common properties such as power law degree distribution, small average distances, community structure, etc. It also appears that many general questions/applications (e.g. community detection, epidemic spreading, search, anomaly detection) are common in various disciplines which study networks. In particular, we aim at understanding the evolution of complex networks with the help of game theoretical tools in connection with Network Engineering Games, as described below. We design efficient tools for measuring specific properties of large scale complex networks and their dynamics. More specifically, we work on the problem of distributed optimization in large networks where nodes cooperatively solve an optimization problem relying only on local information exchange.

Wireless Networks

The amazing technological advances in wireless devices has led networks to become heterogeneous and very complex. Many research groups worldwide investigate performance evaluation of wireless technologies. Maestro 's specificity relies on the use of a large variety of analytic tools from applied probability, control theory and distributed optimization to study and improve wireless network functionalities.

Network Engineering Games

The foundations of Network Engineering Games are currently being laid. These are games arising in telecommunications engineering at all the networking layers. This includes considerations from information and communications theory for dealing with the physical and link layers, along with cross layer approaches. Maestro 's focus is on three areas: routing games, evolutionary games and epidemic games. In routing games we progress on the theory for costs that are not additive over links (such as packet losses or call blocking probabilities). We pursue our research in the stochastic extension of evolutionary game theory, namely the “anonymous sequential games” in which we study the total expected costs and the average cost. Within epidemic games we study epidemics that compete against each other. We apply this to social networks, considering in particular the coupling between various social networks (e.g. propagation strategies that combine Twitter, FaceBook and other social networks).

Green Networking and Smart Grids

The ICT (Information and Communications Technology) sector is becoming one of the main energy consumers worldwide. There is awareness that networks should have a reduced environmental footprint. Our objective is to have a systematically “green” approach when solving optimization problems. The energy cost and the environmental impact should be considered in optimization functions along with traditional performance metrics such as throughput, fairness or delay. We aim at contributing to the design and the analysis of future green networks, in particular those using renewable energy.

Researchers envision that future electricity distribution network will be “smart”, with a large number of small generators (due to an extensive use of renewable energies) and of consumer devices able to adapt their energy needs to a time-varying offer. Generators and devices will be able to locally communicate through the electrical grid itself (or more traditional communication networks), in order to optimize production, transport and use of the energy. This is definitely a new application scenario for Maestro , to which we hope to be able to contribute with our expertise on analytic models and performance evaluation.

Content-Oriented Systems

We generally study problems related with the placement and the retrieval of data in communication networks.

We are particularly interested in In-network caching, a widely adopted technique to provide an efficient access to data or resources on a world-wide deployed system while ensuring scalability and availability. For instance, caches are integral components of the Domain Name System, the World Wide Web, Content Distribution Networks, or the recently proposed Information-Centric Network (ICN) architectures. We analyze network of caches, study their optimal placement in the network and optimize data placement in caches/servers.

We also study other aspects related to replication and placement of data: how much to replicate it and on which servers to place it? Finally, we study optimal ways of retrieving the data through prefetching.

Advances in Methodological Tools

Maestro has a methodological activity that aims at advancing the state of the art in the methodological tools used for the general performance evaluation and control of systems. We contribute to such fields as perturbation analysis, Markov processes, queueing theory, control theory and game theory. Another objective is to enhance our activity on general-purpose modeling algorithms and software for controlled and uncontrolled stochastic systems.