CTO - Networks Lab

CTO-Networks Lab came into existence in Dec 2010 and is co-located with Innovation Labs, Bangalore. The main objective of this lab is to understand and offer value added services and solutions around technology infrastructure especially those related to telecommunication and computer networks.

Networking is a fundamental technology and spans a wide area ranging from networks within buildings to those spanning across a large geography with several new technologies coming into play such as Gigabit Ethernet, Wireless, Cellular, etc. It is important that TCS needs to be in a position to not only understand new technologies to implement them in a cost effective way but also help build standards and drive new technology development. 

The research group is currently active in the following areas:

• Telecommunications Networks:-
  Development of tools and techniques to help cellular service providers to improve and optimize their mobile networks, both during new roll out or after, thus minimizing their capital and operating expenditures. This work spans across technologies such as GSM, CDMA, W-CDMA, and LTE. The team is working on extending popular path loss models to handle Indian terrain conditions (rural and urban) for a broad spectrum range. The team has developed algorithms for up link-scheduling for LTE / WiMAX networks using cross-layer techniques that improves over standard round robin schemes. Besides these, the team has applied novel techniques for performance optimization in terms of life time and throughput maximization in distributed wireless sensor networks. In addition, the team is developing techniques, algorithms and PoCs, etc., that will enable data offloading from the cellular networks to alternate networks such as WiFi, preferably at a lower cost point while maintaining Quality of Experience (QoE) of the users. The team is also working on the areas of Device to Device communication and offloading under the cellular technology, without changing the spectrum of operation.

• Enterprise Networks:-
  The team has developed tools to aid the network architect to design an enterprise data and storage network for a data center, a branch office, etc., taking into account several constraints that a network designer typically faces. The idea is to automate the error prone tasks of a network designer in a short-time span and in an optimal manner. The tool supports products from multiple OEMs and can handle either a greenfield design or a transformational one. The tool updates its product data base automatically, supports multi-vendor data and is being enhanced to support SDN capable equipment as well.

•  Software Defined Networks:-
  The team is working on prototyping a simulation/emulation environment along with a virtualization platform using various open source tools for Software Defined Networks (SDN) to carry out related research. The team has developed algorithms that can dynamically decide the number of controllers based on traffic conditions. This can help address scalability issues and also fault tolerance.  Further, the lab is looking at ways by which SDN concepts can be extended to telecommunications networks, thereby bringing more flexibility in that domain. The team is also looking into different aspects of end-to-end virtualization in a cloud data center possibly built with both SDN-capable and legacy hardware to make Network-as-a-Service a reality. This will enable our vision for a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) framework.

• Information Centric Networks:-
  Information/Content Centric Network/Content Delivery Network (ICN/CCN/CDN) is an alternative computer networking approach which is going to impact the future Internet in a big way. Towards this the Networks Lab team is designing an overlay ICN architecture where naming / addressing, routing, caching and security etc., related issues are being looked into. The team has so far proposed an universal caching algorithm which can be used by ICN routers and other similar devices to enable cache management with a new metric.

Apart from this, the team is actively involved in standardization activities, has many contributions in national and international publications of repute and filed several patents in India and abroad.

Researcher:-

• Simha, Anantha