Differentiated and adaptive robustness in wireless access networks

传统电信基础设施的坚固性正在减弱，原因有两个：无线技术的使用越来越多，从本质上讲，无线技术比有线技术更容易受到攻击；以及向IP的融合，IP的设计理念是“尽力而为”。这种方法有明显的管理优势，但几乎可以肯定的是，这种集成系统的可靠性将受到无线和Internet技术不足的影响。对于普通的家庭用户来说，这可能不是一个特别紧迫的问题，但对于那些希望付费获得可靠性和服务质量的用户来说，这可能非常重要。在紧急情况下，即使故障不直接影响系统，也会有大量的流量激增，这也是极其重要的。在这种情况下，网络可能会过载，并且可能发生无法转发通信的情况，就像最近发生的事件一样。这些都是非常严重的问题，必须在无线/互联网融合完成之前尽快解决。在本项目中，我们研究了目前提出的一些技术如何在有线互联网中提供某些形式的服务保证，这些服务保证可用于提高鲁棒性。另一个困难是，这些技术必须与无线技术配合使用，这个问题到目前为止还没有研究过。这是非常重要的，因为在几年内，我们可以拥有一个完全基于互联网的网络，拥有大量的无线用户。很可能发生的情况是，在紧急情况下，由于紧急情况造成的普遍过载，这些用户，包括救济和安全工作人员，都无法访问网络。这显然不是一种选择，这就是为什么我们现在要开始研究这些问题。

The traditional telecommunications infrastructure robustness is diminishing because of two elements: the increased use of wireless technologies that, by its nature, are more vulnerable than wireline, and the convergence towards IP, which was designed with a "best-effort" philosophy in mind. There are obvious management advantages to this approach but it is almost certain that the reliability of this integrated system will suffer from the inadequacies of both wireless and Internet technology. This may not be a particularly pressing problem for the casual home user, but it could be very important for users that would pay to expect reliability and Quality of Service. It would be also extremely important in emergencies situations, where even if a failure did not affect directly the system, there would be a large surge of traffic. In this case, the network may be overloaded and it may happen that no communications can be relayed as it happened in recent events. These are very serious problems that have to be addressed as soon as possible before the wireless/Internet convergence is complete. In this project, we examine how some techniques currently proposed provide some forms of service guarantees in the wired Internet that can be used to improve robustness. An additional difficulty is that these techniques must be made to work with wireles technology, a problem that has not been examined so far. This is very important since in a few years, we could have a completely Internet-based network with a large population of wireless users. It could very well happen that in an emergency situation, none of these users, including relief and security workers, could access the network, because of the general overload caused by the emergency. This is clearly not an option and that is why we want to start right now to look at these issues.