Protocol design and performance evaluation for network science and engineering

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The Internet has achieved great success in the last half century. The networking research community has realized that we are now at the doorstep of designing and evaluating next-generation network protocols for the next half century. There are many efforts already initiated, such as FIND/GENI/NetSE (US), FIRE (EU), JGN (Japan), etc, driven by the emerging of cloud computing, smart grids, cyber-physical systems, online social networks, etc, collectively under the name of network science and engineering. Besides the traditional demand on networking research, such as performance, reliability, security and testability, these new networking paradigms have created many new challenges such as energy-efficiency, ultra-scalability and heterogeneity, and so on, among which the network topology plays an increasingly important role and affects all upper-layer protocols. The proposed research program, together with other academic and industry research programs in Canada, will keep Canadian society and economy on the leading edge of this international competition. Particularly, traditional network protocols follow the "store-and-forward" principle. With the advance of physical-layer technologies such as cognitive radio, compressive sensing, cooperative communication and white-space networking, as well as the upper-layer technologies such as in-network processing and overlay networking, the design principle is expanded to "store-carry-process-forward" in our research program, to fully utilize predictable, controlled, or user mobility to carry information and to process data flows inside the network to achieve the maximum capacity. This is the first time that such principle is proposed in the research community, although the literature has been examining carry and process separately in last few years. Due to the time/location-varying topology in many emerging, complex systems such as vehicular ad hoc networks, wireless sensor networks, mobile social networks and peer-to-peer networks, we believe such a thorough examination of store, carry, process and forward is very necessary to design and evaluate new protocols for the critical infrastructures that we have to rely on.