Advanced Topics in Communication Networks

Recommended Prerequisites

Communication Networks

Communication Protocols

Programming.

Teaching Methods

Teaching methods: classes of seminar type to address the topics of the course, and tutorial guidance classes for a more specific support to each student. The adopted teaching strategy and methods aim at engaging the student in the learning process and at his personal development. This will allow the student to achieve specific technical competences, and to develop some generic competences of instrumental, personal and systemic nature.

Learning Outcomes

This unit intends to provide the students with a solid theoretical contextualization on advanced communication networks, on advanced sensing and actuation, and media communication. The program starts with a revisions of the existent solutions in the areas of Internet architectures, major technologies and the main solutions. The course also aims to train students in conducting major research in relevant aspects of these areas, in particular: Internet of Things (IoT), reliability and routing, Human-in-the-Loop (HiL), and media networking. Media networking applications have specific requirements that will also be addressed in the context of communication networks. Reliability and resilient routing are central to complex systems, as the ability to react to failures is of paramount importance to assure the continuity and quality of service in networks.

Work Placement(s)

No

Syllabus

1 – Communication Networks
- History of Communication Networks
- Wireless and mobile networks
- Security and Privacy
- Standards

2 – Sensing and Actuation
- Internet of Things
- Industrial Internet of Things
- Human in the Loop
- Mobilephone sensing
- Indirect sensing
- Human behavioral computing
- Anticipatory systems and actuation

3 – Routing
- Reference routing methods in different types of networks
- Introduction to multicriteria optimization models for network performance

4 – Network resilience
- Network reliability calculation
- Resilient routing

5 – Reliability and routing in different types of networks

6 – Media Networking
- Conversational services over networks
- Social Networks
- Multimedia Streaming
- Content adaptation for universal access
- Content Delivery Networks
- Quality of Experience Measurement, Monitoring and Control
- Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality Streaming over Networks.

Head Lecturer(s)

Jorge Miguel Sá Silva

Assessment Methods

Assessment
Presentation : 20.0%
Laboratory work or Field work: 30.0%
Synthesis work: 50.0%

Bibliography

J.-N. Hwang. Multimedia Networking, From Theory to Practice. Cambridge University Press, 2009.

M. van der Schaar, P. A. Chou (Eds.). Multimedia over IP and Wireless Networks – Compression, networking and Systems. Academic Press, 2007.

D. Nunes, J. Sá Silva, F. Boavida. A Practical Introduction to Human-in-the-Loop Cyber-Physical Systems. John Wiley & Sons Limited, 2018.

D. Medhi, K. Ramasamy. Network Routing: Algorithms, Protocols, and Architectures. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2nd edition, 2017.

R. Bhandari. Survivable Networks: Algorithms for diverse routing. Springer, 1999.

J. Rak, D. Hutchison (Eds.). Guide to Disaster-Resilient Communication Networks. Computer Communications and Networks Series, Springer, 2020.

Para cada um dos tópicos leccionados nesta disciplina, um conjunto adicional de artigos serão disponibilizados aos alunos / For each topic to be addressed in the course, a list of additional research papers will be provided to the students.