Research methodology and impact

The foundation for strategic research missions following grand research challenges that impact our society.
Communication and networking, kuvaaja Unto Rautio

The fundamental research themes pursued by Comnet and the specific focus areas are:

Research impact

With the omnipresence of the Internet and mobile communications in the modern world, all elements of networking and networking research are closely intertwined with the national and global society. This means that communication and networking research has a strong inherent element of systems research with an increasingly interdisciplinary character.  Consequently,

  • individual aspects of the research can less and less be viewed in isolation
  • interdisciplinary approaches beyond technical areas are required as is prominently reflected in Comnet’s two chairs in network economics and human-centric communications (and aligned with the Aalto setup)
  • research results are less and less accepted unless their real-world applicability can be shown.

We believe that the role of hardware (HW) in communications systems is changing. More and more network functions can be done in software (SW) using commodity HW. This opens up possibility to virtualize and cloudify communication systems. However, these systems have much more strict requirements in terms of timing, capacity and reliability than general purpose cloud systems requiring special expertise that the department fosters.

Comnet recognizes (and has always done so) the necessity of strong backing by means of real-world data collection, their analysis and modeling, and using this data as input to simulations.  Furthermore, experimentation is a key element of Comnet’s research, particularly in those areas where models are incomplete or not capable of capturing the diversity of the research target (e.g., in wireless communications and user behavior where research has used suboptimal models for a decade). Comnet have built cloud-Radio Access Network (C-RAN) and cloud core testbeds that allow experimental research on all aspects of mobile communications. It also has developed netradar tool for crowdsourcing data gathering from commercial mobile systems in large scale.

The dependency on and close embedding into the real-world and experimental (lab and testbed) environments is depicted in figure 2—which also hints at the need to ensure that the—manifold—research results are suitable for the real world. Practical implementations also can generate IPR in terms of patents or software licenses which in turn can either help existing industries to improve their products and competiveness or generate complete new business in form of startups.

Department of Communications and Networking / Research methodology and impact
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