At present, besides my undergraduate thesis, I have not worked on any major research activity. But I am very interested in working in the following areas, because there is still scope for a lot of work in these areas, going by current literature. And of course, these are not the only areas I am planning to work in. There are obviously other equally interesting areas of research that I have not even come across.
Internetworking of heterogeneous networks: Extensive work in this area has already been done by Dr. M. Veeraraghavan at Polytechnic University, NY. According to Dr. Veeraraghavan, there is no alternative to both Connectionless and Connection-oriented networks, and they have to interwork. This brings up a whole gamut of issues like address interworking and signalling interworking.
But an issue that has not been addressed is as to how the gateways between the CL and CO networks identify flows that are to be sent on the CO network, and those which are to be sent on the CL network. This is an issue in MPLS too.
Wireless Access and Mobility Management: My domain knowledge is mainly centred around the GSM cellular mobile communications system. GSM is an ETSI standard and today has the largest share of the world-wide cellular installations. While GSM has robust mechanisms for mobility management and connection management, it still does not efficiently utilise the air-interface. This is the area of my undergraduate thesis.
An excellent reference for GSM is the book GSM System for Mobile Communications by Mouly and Pautet.
GSM systems, while providing mechanisms for seamless roaming, still do not efficiently route calls to roaming subscribers. This is the problem termed the GSM Tromboning effect. This is a problem that is yet to be solved.
Present-day cellular systems, according to Dr. Tipper ( Providing Fault Tolerance in Wireless Access Networks, pp. 58-64, IEEE Communications Magazine, January 2002 ), also need to incorporate mechanisms for fault tolerance and restoration. There is scope for a lot of work in this area too, particularly as high bit-rate data users on cellular networks are becoming reality.
Signalling in Multimedia Networks: Session Initiation Protocol ( SIP ) using RTP is gaining strength as a signalling protocol to use on multimedia IP networks. This is another area that looks very interesting.
Scaling to high speeds in IP switching: ATM has not made the inroads one expected it to make in the access segment. ATM is presently deployed primarily in the backbone/core. MPLS has been another reason for the continued success of IP switching. There has been prior work done in using IP with high-speed lower layers such as SONET ( IP over SONET, J. Manchester, J. Anderson, B. Doshi and S. Dravida, pp. 136 - 142, IEEE Communications Magazine, May 1998 ). With the advent of optical switching, many ideas have to be re-thought.
manisridhar at hotmail dot com