Validation of the Ambient Networks System Architecture

The Ambient Networks project develops a complete and coherent solution for control architectures in future networks. In particular, the concept of Ambient Control Space has been proposed to support a technology-agnostic, modular and dynamic control plane. The second phase of the project (2006-2007) has an increased focus on validation, where two complementary tracks are being followed: proof-of- concept prototyping and performance evaluation through simulations. The prototype modules, focusing on requirement engineering, were validated during the process of integrating them into a common control space prototype, which was later used to build the demonstration setups. The system performance evaluation through simulations deals with aspects such as capacity utilization, reachability, cost and performance trade-offs and also provides evidence that the additional AN features (e.g., composition) do not introduce excessive signaling overhead. We target different composition aspects, advertising & discovery, negotiation of composition agreements and their interaction with multi-radio access and mobility control. Our validation approach is based on several use cases.