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ICEFIN Research Laboratory

Within this section: General info Research group Publications Related links

General info

ICEFIN is a major project of the Networks and Protocols Group of the Institute of Communications Engineering at TUT (Tampere University of Technology). In 2002, ICEFIN received the status of a spear head project from Tekes (National Technology Agency) together with an annual funding of 270 000 € for three years, 2002 - 2004.

The purpose of the ICEFIN research laboratory is to study such network level issues that have turned out to be problematic in terms of scalability, mobility and security of the current and future Internet. The advances of lower layer technologies in high speed optical transmission, as well as in wireless communications, show a great promise, but full-scale utilization of those developments is not very straightforward. The following four issues have been selected as the focus areas of this project:

Quality of Service:service differentiation, policing and traffic measurements
IPv6: mobility enhancenments and transition mechanisms
WLANs and Security: user authentication system for wireless LANs, new protocol developments
Multicast:better control of multicast traffic flows

Additional goal is to test these techniques in the university campus network and, later, in a multioperator experimental network that will be built around the Tampere region Internet Exchange Point, TREX.

The main focus of the project is on wireline networking, but connecting wireless LANs with the wireline Internet creates problems that deeply concern every technique mentioned above. First, the limited capacity of air interface stresses the need of Quality of Service, secondly, the broadcast nature of the wireless transmission media emphasizes the role of data security, and, thirdly, the increasing amount of mobile users has immediate impact on IP level solutions, such as Mobile IP and transition to IPv6. Therefore it is important to have a proper combination of wireless and wireline elements in the studied networking environment.

Research Group

Head of the group
Professor Jarmo Harju

Senior researchers
Lecturer Jukka Koskinen
Special researcher Yevgeni Koucheryavy
Special reseacher Andrey Krendzel

Laboratory engineer
Heikki Vatiainen, MSc

Researchers (MSc, PhD students):
Avadora Dumitrescu
Sami Keski-Kasari
Dmitri Moltchanov
Jani Peltotalo
Sami Peltotalo
Kimmo Pulakka
Bilhanan Silverajan

Visitors
Roman Dunaitsev, MSc (from SUT, St. Petersburg, Russia, with CIMO grant)
Mark Borst, MSc (from University of Twente, Netherlands, with Erasmus grant)

In addition to the people mentioned above, several MSc students are working as research assistants in the projects of the group.

Publications

More than 45 peer-reviewed international papers have been published in conferences and journals. See the complete list of publications 2002 - 2004.

One PhD thesis, two PhD thesis manuscripts and nine MSc theses have been done within this project, see the descriptions of the sub-projects (QoS, IPv6, WLAN&Security and Multicast).