Projects: PLASTIC
The vision of the PLASTIC (Providing Lightweight and Adaptable Service Technology for Pervasive Information and Communication) project is that users in the B3G era should be provided with a variety of application services exploiting the network's diversity and richness, without requiring systematic availability of an integrated network infrastructure. The success of the provided services then depends on the user perception of the delivered QoS. In particular, the network's diversity and richness must be made available and be exploitable at the application layer, where the delivered services can be most suitably adapted. This demands a comprehensive software engineering approach to the provisioning of services, which encompasses the full service life cycle, from development to validation, and from deployment to execution. The PLASTIC project aims to offer a provisioning platform for software services deployed over B3G networks. The platform will enable dynamic adaptation of services to the environment with respect to resource availability and delivered QoS, via a development paradigm based on Service Level Agreements and resource-aware programming. The middleware will be service oriented, to enable integration and composition of heterogeneous software services from both infrastructure-based and ad hoc networks. The middleware will further integrate key functions for supporting the management of adaptive services in the open wireless environment, dealing with resource awareness and dependability.
My contribution
I worked at this project from October 2007 to February 2008 during my internship with ARLES project team at INRIA Rocquencourt. Within this period, I developed a novel QoS-aware routing protocol for heterogenous ad-hoc mobile networks. This protocol is essentially an extesion of the standard Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) that accounts for the needs of service clients to choose optimal paths according to the nature of consumed services (e.g., minimal delay, minimal cost, guaranteed bandwidth). In this project, web services and, in particular, SOAP-based message exchange, helps us to abstract from the details of the underlying network technologies (e.g., wifi, bluetooth) and enable seamless communication of all kinds of mobile devices.
