Section: Overall Objectives

Presentation of the team

The overall objective of the DIANA project-team is to provide network architectural support for improving citizen rights in the Internet. To do so, we work to provide service transparency and user data control in the context of hundreds of billions of both wired and mobile devices. Our methodology includes advanced measurement techniques, design and implementation of architectural solutions, and their validation in adequate experimental facilities.

The high complexity of the Internet architecture, protocols and services, and the economic interests of the big stakeholders result in a lack of transparency concerning information of high interest to the connected “citizen” such as possible privacy leaks, root cause of service degradation or lock-in behavior. It is therefore important to enhance the network to provide service transparency to citizens.

On the other hand, the ossification of the Internet architecture around the IP protocol makes introduction of new functionalities in the network quite difficult. Users currently have no control on their contents and depend on big companies (e.g., Google drive, iCloud, dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive) to easily access and share data at the expense of their privacy. However, the recent development of software-defined network and network functions virtualization concepts open the perspective of faster deployment of network functionalities, as it abstracts the whole network as a single piece of software, instead of a large number of heterogeneous and dedicated devices to be configured one-by-one.

In the DIANA project-team, we have two main research directions:

• designing and deploying a measurement plane providing network service transparency,

• defining and deploying an open network architecture for user control.

Our research program is presented briefly in the next section.