Research

Our research is situated in the fields of self-organizing networks and network security.

In particular, we focus on three topics:

• Wireless and ad hoc networking,
• Future Internet architecture and protocols, and
• Network measurements and vulnerability analysis.

We collaborate with both academic and industrial partners in multiple running projects.

A selection of these projects is provided below. You may also want to check the list of completed projects.

OneLab2 (Sep 2008 - Nov 2010)

Experimentally driven research is key to success in exploring the possible futures for the internet. OneLab2 is an open and shared large-scale experimental facility, which allows European industries and academia to design and evaluate future Internet solutions. It extends the original OneLab PlanetLab Europe test bed with new facilities. As such the ETH Zürich leads the Situated and Autonomic Communications (SAC) work package to bring delay-tolerant networks (i.e., DTNRG) and innovative networking architectures (i.e., ANA and Haggle) into the loop.

ResumeNet (Sep 2008 - Aug 2011)

ResumeNet addresses the resilience of current and future networks. Resilience in ResumeNet is defined as the ability of the network to provide and maintain an acceptable level of service in the face of various faults and challenges to normal operation, hence as  a superset of commonly used definitions for survivability, dependability, and fault tolerance. The main objective of ResumeNet is to systematically embed resilience in future networks by developing a proper framework, defining its enabler mechanisms and evaluating them experimentally.

Intersection (Jan 2008 - Dec 2009)

The INTERSECTION Project aims to enhance the European potential in the field of security by assuring the protection of heterogeneous networks and infrastructures. INTERSECTION is designing and implementing an integrated security framework made of different subsystems and components providing network and infrastructure security. A working prototype is going to be implemented to be used as final demonstrator of specific scenarios. Involved end users are sharing information on attacks and malfunctions, validate obtained results and host the demonstrator, thus enhancing the effectiveness of such multidisciplinary consortium. INTERSECTION is also contributing to standardisation process in order to foster multi-operator interoperability and coordinated strategies for securing networked systems. Security metrics for assessment and certification of network infrastructures and systems are going to be defined.

COST TMA

The main objective of the COST TMA Action is to increase the quality and the impact of European research in the field of Traffic Monitoring and Analysis (TMA). Modern packet networks are highly complex and ever-evolving objects.  Understanding, developing and managing such environment is difficult and expensive in practice. Traffic Monitoring and Analysis (TMA) has always been seen as a key methodology to understand telecommunication technology and operation, and the complexity of the Internet has attracted many researchers to face traffic measurements since the pioneering times.

ANA Project (Jan 2006 - Dec 2009)

The ANA Project aims at exploring novel ways of organizing and using networks beyond legacy Internet technology. The ultimate goal is to design and develop a novel autonomic network architecture that enables flexible, dynamic, and fully autonomous formation of network nodes as well as whole networks. Universities and research institutes from Europe and Northern America are participating in this project.

NoAH Project

The goal of the NoAH project is the development of an infrastructure for security monitoring
based on honeypot technology. By correlating data received by geographically distributed honeypots, we are able to detect attacks before they have the chance to do any major damage. To contain the spread of attacks once detected, we explore the possibilites for generating automated attack signatures and other containment-related information that is of use for security appliances

PodNet Project

This project investigates how to distribute content to mobile users in the absence of a fixed wireless communication infrastructure. Inspired by social networking, we conceive on top of an “infrastructure” of human-carried personal devices equipped with wireless capabilities like WLAN or Bluetooth a communication network which mimics how people spread information: Information is exchanged between two devices on a solicitation basis during contacts, i.e., whenever two persons come into wireless range. The design philosophy of this new communication paradigm is a radical change compared to well-established communication networks like the Internet or the telephony system which rely on continuous end-to-end connectivity. In our approach, connectivity is intermittent and there might never exist an end-to-end path at a given point in time between two nodes.