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The Institut National des Télécommunications, Evry, France, includes a school of engineering and a school of management and is part of the Groupe des Ecoles des Télécommunications (GET), a public institution funded by the french Ministry of Telecommunications. It has about one thousand students and 150 academic staff people belonging to 10 Teaching/Research Departments.
The Computer Science Department itself is divided into 3 teams: Databases, Parallelism, and Distributed Systems. It groups 21 permanent people and 10 Ph.D. students. This memo describes research activities for the Distributed Systems team only - activities of other teams are described in companion memos.
Execution environments of distributed services and applications are characterized today by an increasing variability in terms of types of devices, underlying network technologies and user mobility. The challenge is to design software infrastructures enabling application developers to focus on functional code design, while being insulated from the variability of the environments in which the applications will be deployed and executed.
Our research activities in the distributed systems domain are done in a global project, MARGE (Middleware pour Appplications Distribuées avec Gestion de l'Environnement - Middleware for distributed applications with context management). The goals of the project are to design, implement and evaluate tools for building object- or component-based middlewares aimed at supporting the execution of distributed applications in environments of any scale, involving devices of any kind (including mobile terminals) and mobile users. We focus on tools allowing dynamic adaptation (at application startup or during application execution) to context characteristics.
The MARGE project is part of the UMR (Unité Mixte de Recherche - Joint research unit) ``SAMOVAR''of CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research), together with other research projects at Institut National des Télécommunications. We contributed to the output of a specific action of CNRS about research problems raised by data access in mobile environments [Bern03,Bern04].