Application Driven Networking in dynamic environments – ADN

Various military and civil applications are dynamic in nature, i.e. the data flows that are exchanged and their Quality of Service (QoS) requirements vary over time. Moreover, often, they operate in changing environments with heterogeneous mobiles nodes involved that communicate via wireless communication links. This dynamic nature of applications and their environment is one of the main challenges for the middleware and consequently for the underlying communication network.

The Data Distribution Service (DDS) middleware, mandated by many Defense agencies, is a key enabling technology to build dynamic distributed applications. Indeed, the publish/subscribe distribution model of DDS with the ability to assign dynamic QoS parameters to DDS distribution services is able to take into account changes in the exchanged data flows and in the required QoS.
This variability assumes that the network is flexible enough to adjust its behavior according to the requirements (unless, overprovisioned with respect to the requirements). This does not hold for legacy communication networks, which are rather static. An emerging class of communication networks named Software Defined/Driven Networks (SDN) is a promising answer to this need since they are able to build networks whose behavior can be programmed and reprogrammed on demand and in a fine grained manner.

The global aim of this project is to propose, prototype and evaluate a communication system combining DDS and SDN networks that is able to support efficiently dynamic distributed applications operating in dynamic environments. More precisely, the objective is to specify a network architecture, methods and techniques that deploy and maintain, a virtual network devoted to a DDS application that is able to dynamically adjust its behavior in response to changes, both, in the application or its QoS requirements and in the environment. In this research project, the focus is on SDN networks. Hence, the virtual network to deploy is build on top of a SDN physical network infrastructure. All the contributions will assume and will be focused on this novel class of networks.
Two applications from the civil and military domain are used in this project to validate and assess the proposed system:
• The first focuses on the dynamic nature of the application (and its QoS) and concerns distributed simulation in the context of vehicle driver training with many driving simulators connected through the network;
• The second focuses on the dynamic nature of the environment and concerns communications in a Theater of Operations.