Right now the transmission capacity of optical fibers increases faster (proportionally) than the computing power in processors. Therefore it is probable that future tele/computer-systems will be optimized to conserve processing power in network nodes and hosts rather than link transmission capacity. The bandwidth available to the average user will increase faster than the commonly affordable computing po wer. Following this reasoning the Telecommunication Systems Labo ratory at the department of Teleinformatics, KTH, research network support and protocols for very high speed networks to take advantage of the expected future performance increase of fiberoptic equipment. Another important research area is the extension of high bandwidth connections to mobile clients to meet the user's demand for mobility.
One of the visions pictures a future global network consisting of very powerful (and expensive) servers serving a multitude of more or less intelligent client terminals over high bandwidth fiberoptic and wireless connections. Another vision pictures a multicast-supporting network with distributed applications migrating through the network to serve the user at the current location(s) of the user. These two visions are not necessarily contradictory.
The research has so far been mainly concentrated on research on the network level of the architecture to efficiently use the potential of fiberoptics, better utilize available radio frequency bands and how to support quality of service guarantees and group communication. Now, we start to research higher level support for the services in the architecture, such as network management, transport protocols, and security.
However, to research support for a set of future services would be quite meaningless without a good picture of the demands of these services. Therefore a group at TS-Lab is researching future content presented, f.ex. on the servers in the architecture above, and the lower level support demands this content will put on the underlying infrastructure.
I will research multicast-based, distributed applications taking advantage of high performance, heterogenous networks that may consist of both physical links and wireless links. In this area of research I will concentrate on applications and application level support for communication and cooperative work over large distances.
The contribution of this research will be an identification of the demands of these services on the network infrastructure and proposed solutions to fullfill those demands.
I aim for a Licentiate degree leading to a specialization and finally a PhD degree in Teleinformatics.
The tentative thesis topic is "Multicast-based distributed services for communication and cooperative work over large distances; Technical Quality of Service demands on underlying layers".
Initially, I will try to capture the state of the art in applications and application level support for communication and cooperative work and especially in the intersection of those areas. I will identify current and predicted (by the industry) future trends as to functionality, user Quality of Service demands as well as current application's - and application level support's dependancies upon underlying layers.
Since, in the future, the network will not be a performance bottleneck, if compared to the processing power available in the hosts/terminals, no assumptions about the underlying network should be made, implicitly or explicitly, by the applications. Therefore I will try to filter out all those assumptions and concentrate on the remaining demands.
The next step is to optimize the functionality with respect to quality of service as experienced by the users, and then identify which demands these optimal applications put on the network.
The final step will be to cooperate with other research activities in a full-scale testing over a large distance, high speed testbed to find scalable, high quality solutions.
The current status of my research is presented on the World Wide Web at URL http://www.it.kth.se/~nv91-tob/Report/
It may seem strange that this plan ranges from July 1 1996, which is more than a year before this plan is written. The reason for this is that the first application , filed in June 1996, somehow was lost halfway in the administrative process and due to everchanging rules this is now the 5th release of my application and the current version is 2.1.1.
During the rest of 1997 I will conduct a study and survey of Multimedia Servers and related research issues. The aim of this study is to get acquainted with this type of applications and the issues involved, both from a network-perspective and from a user-perspective. The aim is not to learn how to build a server.
This research activity is funded 40% by the Multimedia European Research Conferencing Integration (MERCI) project and 40% by KTH FoFu. The result of this research will be an internal report to MERCI in November-December and a published Technical Report by the end of the year.
Except from this I will attend a course in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and participate in the development of a platform for supporting distance education in the Sweden - Silicon Valley Link programme and the distributed Graduate school in Teleinformatics.
Following is the research proposal presented to MERCI.
Digital audio, video and computer supported cooperation tools are HYPE. Video on Demand-, and Multimedia servers are sprouting up everywhere like weeds. There are several presentation languages and distributed programming languages waiting for streaming material to display in flashy shows on Interactive TV, networked kiosks, home computers, you name it. Every platform vendor have presented their own high performance solution, and a lot of heavyweight players like f.ex. Microsoft, Netscape and Progressive Networks have launched their own products. The standardisation organisations IETF and ITU-T works hard to keep up with the current avalanche-like development and tries to cooperate with eachother as well as with the commercial vendors to produce working standards.
During the last year I have been collecting information about research projects and commercial development efforts as well as the standardisation efforts related to networked digital multimedia in general, and Media on Demand in particular. I have a lot of information, but no common structure in which to present it. When I look at all these announcements of new products and all new research papers on Multimedia Server systems, I wish I had some classification scheme to use in comparing the different solutions. Some general taxonomy that is not connected to a specific product or research prototype.
I will develop a taxonomy over Multimedia Server-related elements to help in comparing different Multimedia Server solutions with regard to
In parallell to this effort, I will continue to collect information about -, and test Multimedia servers to produce a survey over existing solutions using the above taxonomy. It will be an iterative process where the two parts will interactively complement each other.
The survey will ofcourse relatively soon become outdated, but my hope is that the taxonomy will have a more lasting value.
During the spring of 1998 I will mainly take courses and prepare and present my licentiate proposal. I will also take part in the further development of the distributed Graduate School in Teleinformatics and continue to follow the research in the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work.
I plan to take the courses found in the Study Plan (table 1) below. In the cases where a course code exists, it is given. In the Name field "G" stands for Graduate course. The institution holding the course is also given. The P- field is the duration of the course in full-time weeks. In the Date-field is noted when I plan to take the course(Fall, Spring). In the Exam-field is/will be noted when I complete the course.
The Minimal Programme is the minimal amount of courses I need to take. The Extended Programme includes other related courses that I consider to take if time allows.
Table 1: Study Plan
| Code | Minimal Programme | P | Date | Exam |
| 2G1307 | Telesystem gk. IT. | 3 | F96 | S97 |
| ABC '96. SICS | 1 | F96 | ||
| 2G1309 | Telecom system design seminars. G. IT | 4 | F96 | F99 |
| Multimedia Services, Telecommunication finger course. G. IT | 2 | S97 | S97 | |
| 2G5542 | Internet Multicast. G. IT | 2 | F97 | F97 |
| 2D1965 | Människadatorinteraktion.NADA | 4 | F97 | |
| 2G5548 | Reading Seminar on Performance Evaluation | 6 | F98 | S99 |
| 2D1416 | Datorstöd för samarbete. G. NADA | 6 | ||
| 2G1303 | High-Speed Networks, Telecommunication finger course IT | 2 | ||
| 2G5539 | Teleinformatik. G. IT | 10 | ||
| 2G1305 | Internetworking. IT | 4 | ||
| Total Points | 44 | 22 | 13 | |
| Code | Extended Programme | P | Date | Exam |
| Research Methodology. G. PCC/DSV | 5 | ? | ||
| 2G5530 | Design and Implementation of High-Performance Networks. G. IT | 6 | ? | |
| 2D1410 | Användarcentrerad programutveckling.NADA | 6 | ? | |
| 2G1401 | Innovation and Entrepreneurship. G. IT | 3 | ? | |
| 2D5340 | Theoretical Distributed Computing. G. NADA | 4 | ? | |
| Project Management. G. PCC | 4 | ? | ||
| Distr. op. systems and architectures. G. PCC | 4 | ? | ||
| Internetworking and Mobile C&C. G. IT | 4 | ? | ||
| 2D1413 | Avancerad grafik och interaktion. NADA | 6 | ? | |
| Total Points | 86 |
I intend to spend full-time on studies and project work related to my field of research until late fall 2001 or early spring 2002.
I started my graduate studies July 1, 1996 and presented a time plan in the application filed at that time. The following time plan is a somewhat post-edited version to reflect the activities that I actually was involved in.
To plan beyond Fall 1998 is very hard since to date I have not yet decided the subject of my Licentiate proposal.
Table 2: How much a grad. student cost
| Post | SEK |
| Salary + Social expenses | 449 094 |
| Computer system support | 32 400 |
| Working area. 11 m2 | 40 000 |
| Dept. administration | 100 000 |
| Travel | 20 000 |
| Total per year | 641 494 |
On top of the total cost it is custom to add 13.46 % for administrative overhead for external funding.
80 % Project financed
20 % (128 299 SEK) Departmental duty
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