The emerging global communication and service infrastructures need to be
more and more pervasive, high-performing and reliable. The underlying
scenario is basically characterized by decentralization, autonomy, and
general lack of coordination among the heterogeneous network entities,
the network in turn intrinsically being a common playground for a large
number of users. These users exhibit various degrees of intentional or
unintentional non cooperative behaviour, while competing for shared and
often scarce resources. Besides, they increasingly demand also stable
connection and seamless access to the network resources, by means of the
enormous potential offered by the new wireless equipments and
capabilities.
The combination of uncoordination and wireless access induces a degree
of dynamism never experienced before, that must be necessarily faced by
the emerging services and applications, and calls for a pressing
solution of the resulting scientific and technological challenges. In
such a highly elusive and mutable setting, the focus of the present
project is that of evaluating the impact on the network performance
induced by the combination of the lack of users
cooperation/collaboration and the presence of users mobility/dynamism.
To this respect, the general mismatch between the network optimization
goals and the competing users private interests, motivates the following
research directions:
1) modeling and analyzing the consequences of the autonomous users behaviour on the network performance;
2) accounting for specific features imposed by the dynamic nature of
these networks (e.g., users mobility, wireless medium, unreliable
connectivity, etc.);
3) investigating the influence of the different degrees of users social
knowledge on users behaviour when analyzing items 1) and 2) above, and,
consequently, on the system performance and on the induced mobility
patterns and network topology;
4) evaluating the solutions developed in
1), 2), and 3) also through extensive simulations.
As a
final outcome, the most significant algorithm/protocols and application
scenarios will be packaged in a software tool (a "demonstrator") which
will be made available to the research community.
