• QoS analysis and management
• Security in data networks
• Knowledge Management & Digital Enterprise
• New technologies and transmission systems
• Information Systems

Perceived QoS

Latest research initiatives and industry trends regarding networking lead to a near future of pervasive, transparent and context-aware connectivity over heterogeneous access technologies. Hence, several efforts during FP6 have been conducted towards designing and testing both access and core solutions to ensure always-on services with reasonable QoS conditions. In fact, QoS provision and measurement is one of the key factors in several scenarios of NGNs. At the same time, context-aware services have to deal with the adaptation of systems and devices to the users' requirements and actual environment. On the same hand, ambient technologies cope with handover and roaming problems while switching between access networks while providing pervasive connectivity. Finally, some initiatives try to reduce the gap between network and content providers by using policies and semantic ontologies in order to map users requirement and content characteristics.

Therefore, there appear several circumstances where certain criteria are assumed in order to make a decision: signal level for switching between access networks, location for accessing different services in context-aware services and QoS and other constraints in several other scenarios such as grid and ad-hoc/mesh networks.

Although some of these initiatives are supposed to be user-centered, at most they have developed methods to translate some user requirements into technical parameters but do not evaluate overall user satisfaction. However, end users' satisfaction should be the leading goal in the design, implementation and management of both network infrastructure, protocols and services. Our research is focused on PQoS-aware network planning and management.