The GNAN research group headed by Professor Raghupathy Sivakumar focusses on researching and developing network architectures and protocols for the future Internet. We envision the future Internet to exhibit, among other things, three key characteristics: a much larger and more dominant mobile user populace enabled by the advancement and widespread pervasiveness of wireless networking technologies, increased sensitiveness to the diversity of Internet applications by way of supporting fine grained quality of service provisioning, and ease of extensibility, allowing for network providers to upgrade Internet services on-the-fly, and thus keep pace with the growing diversity of end-user applications. The following are some specific areas that the group currently works in:

• Network architectures for next generation wireless networks, including conventional cellular networks, ad-hoc multihop networks, and other hybrid network models. Algorithms for wireless network protocol layers including the medium access control, network, transport, and middleware layers.
• Architectures for providing quality of service (QoS) in the future Internet in heterogenous wired and wireless network environments. Special focus areas include scalable core-stateless approaches and robust overlay network architectures. Algorithms for supporting QoS assurances in heterogenous environments, for metrics including bandwidth, delay, jitter, etc.
• Approaches for making the Internet extensible in a scalable fashion. Research areas include macro-level network architectures and micro-level node architectures. Identifying the use of network extensibility in specific areas like mobile computing and QoS provisioning. Architectures and algorithms for advanced network capabilities like self-healing and self-evolution.

For a detailed look at the specific projects that the GNAN research group is currently working on, please follow the Projects link.