Internet Related Technology

The Internet has been the driving force behind the networking and IT revolution in the past few years, becoming the single most important infrastructure in the information age. We at FLA are investigating networking and architecture issues of high performance, broadband end-to-end IP network and services.

Research Themes

1. High-performance IP networking

Design of high-performance IP network is an important as yet a very challenging issue. The problem has multiple facets, high peformance IP node design, making use of hardware-based switching technology and software-based routing algorithms. Quality of Service (QoS) is a key concept in the next generation, high performance IP network.

2. IP network control

Multimedia and dynamically changing traffic of IP network give rise to tough IP network control problems, demanding sophisticated system monitoring and control techniques. Key elements in system management are network measurement and network middleware. The network middleware exercises dynamic load balancing, which stabilize traffic variation and service quality variation, maximizing network resource usage. Researches on new techniques of network measurement and load balancing are actively pursued.

3. IP network management

Increasing complexity of IP service and network management has lead to innovations in management architecture. Policy-based networking (PBN) provides provides flexibility to IP network management through combination of management knowledge embodied as policies and networking devices controlled by policies. With the emergence of end-to-end IP networks, more scalable policy-based networking techniques are becoming important. We are currently studying a new PBN architure for end-to-end, broadband multimedia IP services.

4. Internet service

In the Internet age people have a life in the virtual world in addition to their life in the physical world. We are working to making online life more convenient and useful by innovating network services. This motivation has led us to some research topics on Internet application layer architecture, including a new concept of metaphor of Internet, awareness services, IP telephony services or so on.

5. Agent Technology

Software agent technology promises to be critical in enabling network aware systems to interoperate with each other. This is because agents represent a locus of control that can be easily identified and managed in a distributed environment.
We are focussing on developing international standards to encourage interoperability of agent systems -- with FIPA (www.fipa.org) and OMG (www.omg.org) and on developing programming languages and methodologies for developing Internet based agent systems.