DISTRIBCOM : Distributed and Iterative Algorithms in Management and Signal Processing for Telecommunications (project-team)

About the project : Project-Team site Activity report Research reports Theses Theme : Com Communicating systems Rennes - Bretagne Atlantique research center

This Research-Team is a follow-up of SIGMA2 Research-Team

Project-Team Presentation

Joint project-team with CNRS, INSA of Rennes, University of Rennes 1 and ENS Cachan.

DISTRIBCOM addresses distributed and iterative algorithms for network & service management. The 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.

Research themes

• 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.
• Our second 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 relations

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. More recently, we have started investigating, in cooperation with Serge Abiteboul (GEMO project-team), an Active XML infrastructure for business processes based on Web services.

Software

SOFAT

Scientific leader

Albert BENVENISTE     [homepage]
+33 2 99 84 72 35
Albert.Benveniste@irisa.fr
Secretary : +33 2 99 84 72 28