ULOOP

This project is lead by Dr. Jean-Marc Seigneur as part of its main field of research, which is online e-reputation and computational trust management based on the human notion of trust.The flexibility inherent to wireless technologies is giving rise to new types of access networks and allowing the Internet to expand in a user-centric way. This is particularly relevant if one considers that wireless technologies such as Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) currently complement Internet access broadband technologies, forming the last hop to the end-user. This fact becomes even more significant due to the dense deployment of Wi-Fi Access Points that is nowadays common in urban environments. Due to such density, a relevant aspect that can be worked upon is leveraging such "wireless local-loop" by developing networking mechanisms that allow adequate resource management and a future Internet architecture to scale in an autonomic way. Such wireless local-loop could then reach rates closer to the ones provided by current broadband access technologies. This is the underlying idea of ULOOP, which shall provide software functionality to sustain a user-centric robust, secure, and autonomic network growth. ULOOP objectives are two-fold. Firstly, to develop and to validate identified core mechanisms that aid in the development of user-centric robust, trustworthy, low-cost, and indirectly energy-efficient wireless local-loops. Secondly, to bring awareness to the topic of user-centric networking from a standardisation and legislation perspective.