University of Würzburg (UW)

Partner description

The Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science is one of the ten faculties of the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg. Within the faculty, there are two institutes: Mathematics and Computer Science. Nine autonomous chairs constitute the Institute of Computer Science covering a broad spectrum of research in computer science. The institute of computer science consists of 14 full professors. The chair of communication networks focuses on performance evaluation of distributed systems and networking in general. The chair was founded by Prof. Phuoc Tran-Gia in 1988 and is led by him since that time. Currently, the chair has 2 post-doc positions and 10 doctoral research students. In particular, the research activities of the chair focus on performance analysis, dimensioning, and optimization of telecommunication systems. The chair applies methods in queuing theory, probability theory, simulation, and optimization theory to design, analyze, assess and improve the performance of telecommunication systems and networks. This includes overlay and data center networks as well as inter-cloud communications. Current research activities can be grouped into the following major topics: (a) Future Internet & Smartphone Applications, (b) QoE Modeling & Resource Management, (c) Software Defined Networking & Cloud Networks, (d) Network Dynamics & Control. In all major research areas the chair maintains various co-operations with industry, e.g., Siemens, France Telecom, or T-Mobile International, and other research facilities. UniWue has been and is involved in a number of EU FP7 projects such as FP7 STREP SmoothIT and FP7 STREP SmartenIT. Furthermore, the chair played and plays an active role in Network of Excellence Euro-NGI, Euro-FGI, Euro-NF as well as in COST TMA, COST Qualinet, COST IC 0804, COST 290, COST 279, COST 257.

UniWue has large experience in measurements in real-world systems or deployed test beds, e.g. QoE monitoring of YouTube video streaming or QoE management of scalable H.264/SVC video streaming in the G-Lab project “National Platform for Future Internet Studies”. Quantitative relationships between QoE and QoS and corresponding QoE models were developed for applications like Skype, YouTube, H.264/SVC video streaming, cloud gaming and browsing of simple photo pages which were conducted in the context of various projects (Euro-NF, national funded BMBF project G-Lab, national funded DFG project ÖkoNet). An extension to cloud applications is a current research focus. Further, , UniWue considers crowdsourcing as an alternative approach for conducting experiments with users or subjective user studies and started to derive a methodology and statistical analysis framework within COST Qualinet. 

As a Collaborating Institution in mPlane, University of Würzburg will contribute with its expertise incloud applications in general. Thereby, characterization and modeling of traffic generated by cloud applications falls into UniWue’s expertise. Further, measurements on application-layer fall into the research domain, which are required to study QoE in subjective user studies based on realistic application behavior. Another expertise is on crowdsourcing which may be utilized for network measurements and QoE studies. UniWue has large experience in the data analysis of large-scale measurement data.

Role in mPlane

University of Würzburg will be mainly involved in the following WPs:

• WP2 - Programmable Probes: Crowdsourcing based network measurements of selected cloud applications
  Estimation of the allocated effort: approximately  1 PM
• WP3 - Large-scale data analysis: Analysis of measurements traces from cloud applications on network layer and application layer
  Estimation of the allocated effort: approximately  2 PM

Key Personnel

Prof. Phuoc Tran-Gia founded the chair in 1988 and is led by him since that time; previously he was at academia in Stuttgart, Siegen (Germany) as well as industry at Alcatel, IBM Zurich Research Laboratory; he is consultant and cooperation project leader with industry, telecom operators, and European Science Foundation (Brussels); coordinator of the G-Lab project “National Platform for Future Internet Studies”.

Dr. Tobias Hossfeld is leading a research group on Future Internet Applications within the chair and is manager of national and international research project within the chair with a focus on traffic management and QoE. He is currently leading the OekoNet project; work package leader in the FP7 SmartenIT on traffic measurements and scenario definitions for socially-aware management of new overlay application traffic in the Internet; he is heading two task forces in COST Qualinet on Crowdsourcing for QoE studies as well as on Web and Cloud QoE.