DISTRIBCOM

Distributed and iterative algorithms in management and signal processing for telecommunications

Context and objectives

DISTRIBCOM addresses distributed and iterative algorithms for both network & service management and digital communications. The first and main focus of DISTRIBCOM is on algorithms for distributed management. Today, research on network and service management focuses mainly on issues of software architecture and infrastructure deployment. However, management involves also algorithmic problems such as fault diagnosis and alarm correlation, provisioning and optimisation, and negociation for QoS. DISTRIBCOM develops the fundamentals supporting such algorithms: fundamentals of distributed observation and supervision of systems involving concurrency. We develop behavioural of distributed management systems and use these for our algorithms. We also study the automatic generation and learning of such models. Some of the iterative techniques we develop are also useful at handling joint algorithms of signal processing and coding in digital communications. This is the second objective of DISTRIBCOM.

Research axes

• Distributed self-management will play a central role in managing complex networks where the distribution of the various aspects of management such as monitoring, configuration, provisioning, billing, fault, and performance becomes imperative for greater reliability, scalability and efficiency. Developing distributed algorithms for fault management, provisioning, configuration, and potentially security, is our first research direction.
• Digital communications at the physical layer have evolved from a traditional approach where the different functions of modulation, coding, and equalization, were considered separately, to an integrated systems approach. The joint design of different functions can be seen as the distributed coordination between different algorithms: turbo-techniques for the joint design of different functions have recently emerged, they constitute the second research direction of DISTRIBCOM.
• Our third focus is the development of the fundamentals of distributed algorithms. We build on the top of so-called true concurrency models for distributed systems such as event structures and nets. We develop algorithms for the inference of hidden states from distributed observations, for systems with concurrency and dynamicity. We develop stochastic models for systems with concurrency.
• Our algorithms require that a model of the system is at hand. For large systems such as management systems, this cannot be achieved manually. We develop studies on what we call self-modeling, namely the technique of automatically deploying the behavioural model of an infrastructure knowing the generic behaviours of its components.

International and industrial partnerships

Our main industrial ties are with Alcatel and France-Telecom, on the topic of networks and service management. We participate jointly with them to the SWAN RNRT project on self-management of networks and Web services. On a related topic, we cooperate with France-Telecom on the technology of scenarios and distributed testing, in the framework of the PERSIFORM RNRT project.

Scientific leader

Albert Benveniste
+33 2 99 84 72 35
Administrative assistant +33 2 99 84 74 84

About team

Web site
Activity report

Topic

Networks and distributed systems

All projects on this topic

Address

IRISA - Campus universitaire de Beaulieu - 35042 Rennes Cedex

This project follows

SIGMA2