The ACN program includes a major scientific project to allow “learning through real research“: students will be anononducting a real research project, in a part-time apprenticeship with one or more tutors from academia or/and industry.
The projects this year range from the “Internet of Things” over “advanced protocol security” to “networks for large data centres” – a few samples of these are given below:
- Antoine Paris, working with Wenqin Shao and Jean-Louis Rougier (Telecom Paris’Tech), studies Data mining Round Trip Time measurements for dynamic Inter-domain Traffic Engineering. Their purpose is to improve traffic performance of BGP multi-homing with a route decision engine in real time – their approach is studying the relationship between changes in measurements such as RTT, traceroutes and events in the network.
- Yifan Du, working with Jiazi Yi (Ecole Polytechnique), is poking at LoRa – a long-range wide area network technology. They are is trying to find ways to improve LoRa’s L2-performance: the MAC protocol in LoRa is the well-known ALOHA protocol – famously known for being extremely simple, but also infamously known for offering very low channel utilisation, and a low probability (18%) of success when many devices are trying to access the channel concurrently.
- Tran Quang Huy, working with Keun-Woo Lim (Telecom Paris’Tech), is trying to apply software-defined networking for IoT management.
- Rahif Kassab, working with Wael Kanoun and Matteo Signorini from Nokia Bell-Labs, is looking at Blockchain and IoT security, specifically studying the behaviour of the blockchain over time, in order to detect (if possible) malicious behaviour (such as attacks).
- Joe Farajallah, working with Thomas Clausen and Ben Smith (Ecole Polytechnique), studies advanced routing protocol security. A lot of routing (& other) protocols have intermediate systems modify a control message (e.g., decrement a TTL field, add a piece of information, etc) – rendering any ICVs (Integrity Control Values – signatures) generated by the originator worthless. The goal of this project is to work out if (and, if so, how) clever use of advanced cryptology with aggregate signatures will be a viable (i.e., sufficiently performant) tool.
- Nicolas Pontois, working with Mathieu Bouet and Vania Conan (Thales Communication and Security), studies Locality-based placement of virtual network functions. Specifically, they are looking at how mobile edge computing centres can be deployed in a city (based on the dataset of Milan) to maximise performance.
- Dmytro Shityi, under supervision by Luigi Iannone (Telecom-Paris’Tech), works on developing a way to a way to locate the Tracker, an OpenStack service based on MANO framework, to provide high availability.
As it is, it’s still only the November, and the projects have only just started. Provided that the students keep their noses to the grindstones, I’m hopeful to see most exciting results at their final presentations in the spring of 2017!