Abstract:  The Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) carry the promise of expanding the quality of life and care across a large variety of healthcare applications. These wearable health-monitoring systems aim to support early detection of abnormal conditions and prevention of their serious consequences. Patients benefit from continuous ambulatory monitoring as a part of a diagnostic procedure, optimal maintenance of a chronic condition or during supervised recovery from an acute event or surgical procedure. However, to set up such systems several issues along the communication chain should be resolved. Confidentiality and data security, Quality of Service (QoS) over a WBAN, end-to-end QoS over WBAN’s heterogeneous peer-networks, ...etc. are some of the important challenges that should be considered. This talk highlights some network issues in ehealth systems with a special focus on the intra-WBAN data aggregation at the MAC layer and the inter-WBANs cooperation at the network layer. The Quality of Service (QoS) for WBAN to peer-networks communication will also be discussed through an end-to-end scheduling solution we have developed in the context of 5G peer-network. This solution aims to mitigate the waiting time of emergency, high-priority and medical data traffic classes over other traffic classes at the coordinator. At the end, some future research directions will be discussed.

Biography:  Saadi Boudjit is Associate Professor (Maître de conferences - HDR) and member of the L2TI laboratory at the university Sorbonne Paris Nord. He is working on wireless ad hoc architectures and was involved in several national and international research projects (International project QNRF NPRP8-140-2-065, Paris region project THD, RIAM project SoundDelta, ANR project R2M, ... etc). He received his Ph.D degree in Computer Science from INRIA and was a research fellow with Telecom ParisTech. Dr. Boudjit is the initiator and Co-chair of ACM MobileHealth workshop, which aims at providing a forum for the interaction of multiple areas related to pervasive wireless healthcare systems. He also acted or still acts as TPC member of several IFIP, ACM and IEEE conferences and workshops (HealthCom, MobileHealth, ICC, Globecom, CAMAD, WCNC, WONS, DCOSS, ...). His research interests include wireless networks, parallel and distributed computing, protocols and architecture design for mobile ad hoc networks, wireless sensor networks, vehicular ad hoc networks, and eHealth systems.

Abstract: The tutorial will first provide an overview of the research context and current research activities on non-terrestrial networks, highlighting societal challenges related to the limited coverage of networks in rural areas. It will then focus on a specific case study concerning resilient network architecture in nanosatellite swarms, detailing the challenges and proposed solutions to overcome communication limitations in space. It aims to design a reliable network architecture for nanosatellite swarms, addressing robustness and resilience challenges. Finally, the tutorial will explore research avenues to integrate new services (IoT, V2X and Cooperative Perception) into hybrid terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks, emphasizing the importance of optimizing communication protocols and integrating emerging technologies to ensure robust and resilient connectivity. 

Biography: Riadh DHAOU is a computer scientist working in the area of telecommunication networks. He is a Professor at the Toulouse INP (Institut National Polytechnique de Toulouse). He joined the Toulouse INP-ENSEEIHT in 2003. He holds a joint appointment with the Computer Science and Telecommunication department of the ENSEEIHT and he is a member of the RMESS team of the IRIT (Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse) laboratory (CNRS-UMR 5505). He leads research activities on non terrestrial networks. His research interests include statistical characterization and modelling of mobility, mobile and space communications, modelling and optimization of cross-layer schemes, performance analysis of wireless networks, autonomous multi-hop/cooperative communications systems, capacity and outage analysis of multi-user heterogeneous wireless systems, resource allocation, design and performance evaluation of wireless sensor networks and energy consumption optimization. 

Abstract:  From virtual reality and teleportation, to telepresence, augmented reality, holograms, and remotely‑controlled robotics, these future network applications promise an unprecedented development for society, economics and culture by revolutionizing the way we live, learn, work and play. Unfortunately, today’s Internet falls short when it comes to providing the stringent performance requirements imposed by such applications. In this talk, we start by analyzing the characteristics and requirements of future networking applications and highlight the limitations of the current network architecture and protocols. We then draw a rough sketch of FlexNGIA, a Flexible Next-Generation Internet Architecture that is able to satisfy the requirements of future Internet applications and services. We also introduce the FlexNGIA International Testbed, a new effort by the FlexNGIA community towards building and experimenting with future Internet applications and technologies.

Biography:  Mohamed Faten Zhani is currently Assistant Professor with the department of Networks and Multimedia at the Institut Supérieur d'Informatique et des Techniques de Communication (ISITCom, University of Sousse) in Tunisia and founder of the FlexNGIA international project that focuses on the design of future Internet architectures and protocols. Before that, he was Associate Professor with the department of software and IT engineering at l’École de Technologie Supérieure (ÉTS Montreal) in Canada (2015-2023). His research interests include future Internet architectures and protocols, cloud computing, network function virtualization, software-defined networking and resource management in large-scale distributed systems. Faten received the IEEE/IFIP IM 2017 Young Researchers and Professionals Award as a recognition for outstanding research contribution and leadership in the field of network and service management. He is a senior IEEE member.

Abstract: In today's digital era, marked by the widespread use of smartphones and the ever-present wireless networks, the creation of digital traces has become an inevitable aspect of daily life, revealing patterns in user behavior and movements. In this talk, we present a passive WiFi sniffing platform developed under the ANR Mitik project and related challenges to collect and analyze datasets based on probe requests. This platform integrates advanced tools to overcome several challenges, including protecting user privacy, managing MAC address associations, and reconstructing mobile trajectories. By effectively tackling these issues, the platform seeks to aid in deducting individual travel habits and the identification of potential connections among different devices. 

Biography: Nadjib Achir is an Associate professor (HDR) at University Sorbonne Paris Nord (previously University Paris 13) since 2004. He's currently member of the TRiBE team at Inria-Saclay. His current scientific interests are in the area of networked systems, with a focus on mobile wireless systems. 

Abstract: This talk addresses the problem of quantifying the capacity limit in a wireless network all connected to a single access point. In the particular case when the network is made of independent wireless transmitters distributed in a uniform Poisson field in the infinite plan under a non-selective Rayleigh fading, it has been shown by numerous authors that the capacity limit in bit per Hertz is exactly equal to the ratio of the attenuation factor on the dimension of the Euclidian space embedding the network. However, this simple result is limited in scope and arrives after long and tedious computational steps. In this talk we present a much more general result, called the “Energy differentiated field theorem”, which allows to derive the capacity limit in more general setting: general radio fading, general geographic distribution of transmitters, etc. It uses the differentiation of the average logarithm of the energy field around the base station. All The previous limit results which were obtained with lot of efforts, now very easily comes sometimes just via pure scaling comparison. We can generalize with the same ease to the cases where the geographical distribution of transmitters show complicated patterns with fractal dimensions as we expect as we can expect in natural landscape and real urban deployments. 

Biography:   I have been with Inria, Rocquencourt-Paris center until 2011. In 2012 I spent an extended sabbatical with Nokia Bell Labs. In 2019 I am back in Inria as research director in the Saclay-Ile-de-France center, in the research team TRIBE. Meanwhile I have been professeur charge' de cours in Ecole Polytechnique (France) from 2006 to 2016. My current scientific interests are the analysis of algorithms, information theory, wireless telecommunication and artificial intelligence. I was lucky enough to witness the rise of wireless local area networks, with WiFi and HIPERLAN, and the advent of mobile ad hoc networks with OLSR. I am an IEEE Fellow in the Information Theory Society. 

Abstract: The purpose of this study is to  analyze the so-called backoff technique of the IEEE~802.11 protocol  with buffers. This protocol rules the transmissions on a radio channel between nodes (or stations) of a network exchanging packets of information. In contrast to existing models, packets arriving  at a station which in the backoff state are not discarded, but are stored in a buffer of infinite capacity.  The backoff state corresponds to the number of time-intervals (mini-slot) that a node must wait before its packet is actually transmitted. As in previous studies, the key point of our analysis hinges on the assumption that the time on the  radio channel is viewed as a random succession of transmission slots (whose duration corresponds to a packet transmission time) and  mini-slots, which stand for the time intervals during which the backoff of the station is decremented. During these mini-slots the channel is idle, which implies that there is no packet transmission. These events occur independently with given probabilities, and the external arrivals of messages follow a Poisson process. The state of a node is represented by a three-dimensional Markov chain in discrete-time, formed by the triple (backoff counter, number of packets at the station, number of transmission attempts). Stability (ergodicity) conditions are obtained for an arbitrary station and interpreted in terms of maximum throughput. Several approximations related to these models are also discussed. 

Biography: Paul Mühlethaler (Member, IEEE) was born in February, in 1961. He received the degree from the École Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France, in 1984, and the Ph.D. and Habilitation degrees from Paris Dauphine University, Paris, France, in 1989 and 1998, respectively. He has been a Researcher with the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA), Paris, since 1988, and is currently the Research Director with INRIA, where he is leading the EVA Team. His research interests include protocols for networks with a specialty in wireless networks, vehicular networks, and the IoT. He had also a few, often referenced, results on scheduling issues. In wireless networks, he has actively worked at ETSI and IETF for the HiPERLAN and OLSR standards. He is also following the European standardization for vehicular networks. He is also particularly interested in understanding the achievable performance of multihop ad hoc networks and in tracking all the possible optimization ways of such networks. He was among the First contributors for the OLSR protocol, in 1997. He was a recipient of the price “Science et Defense” for his work on mobile ad hoc networks, in 2004.