Elements in Action:

Innovative Customer Applications

Our researchers are adept at taking their innovative ideas and putting them to practical use in multiple industries. Below are examples of actual implementations of our innovations.

Security
Mobile Messaging
Defense
Seamless Mobility

Security
Telcordia Applied Research is the leading provider of custom-designed network and system security solutions for Federal and commercial clients. Recent projects have addressed challenging problems such as Internet worm detection and mitigation, trace-back of cyber-attacks, intrusion detection for wireless networks, and automated IP network assessments. Promising R&D projects are successfully transitioned in to relevant Government programs such as Future Combat Systems, or are set on a commercial development path. A good example of the latter is the Vulnerability and Compliance Assessment (VCAS) product, which is the culmination of a multi-year multimillion dollar collaborative effort between the DoD, DHS, and Telcordia. Successful trials with multiple organizations have now progressed to procurement discussions with customers and channel partners.

Mobile Messaging
Telcordia together with A4AMobile has launched a fully integrated mobile dynamic platform for newspaper and publishing companies. The Media Mobile Initiative helps publishers improve their competitive position and drive revenue by increasing their reach and frequency across all markets and demographics, also helping to develop new advertising revenue and create valuable database resources.

This Initiative enables member newspapers to provide consumers in their markets with a customized mobile connection to the content of their choice. Using their cell phones, consumers can receive editorial content, access display and classified ads, and register for specific alerts, contests, and promotions. Newspapers will be able to serve readers when they're on the go, thereby increasing loyalty and making their products more attractive to advertisers.

The backbone of this innovative solution is our Mobile Messaging and Application Platform, part of our Notification Solutions portfolio. Notification Solutions were previously available only to government entities and financial corporations, and the platform now makes them available to major brands for developing mobile marketing solutions.

Mobile Ad Hoc Network Engineering Design Tool
Telcordia developed an engineering design tool for wireless mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) that enables the systematic design of MANETs to meet certain performance objectives, such as throughput and delay, subject to various constraints, such as available resources. The tool is critical to the successful deployment of MANETs both because of the large number of design choices that will have to be made for any particular deployment scenario and because there exists no systematic body of design principles that a network designer can rely upon to guide these choices. The current version of the tool includes key design features such as node placement, topology generation, link creation, link bandwidth allocation, MAC transmission scheduling, domain partitioning, routing and capacity analysis. Additional features such as terrain and mobility modeling, adaptive queue management and security effects are currently being added to the tool.

This effort provides a new and critical capability to optimize the engineering design of large, multi-tiered tactical MANETs, such as the Warfighter Information Network - Tactical (WIN-T) and Future Combat Systems (FCS) as well as those planned for emergency/rescue operations and law enforcement. The project is currently funded by the U. S. Army CERDEC* at Fort Monmouth, NJ to extend the tool's design capabilities with the WIN-T network simulations used to verify the tool. In addition, network design algorithms that will be incorporated into the tool are currently being developed under a contract with the U. S. Army Research Laboratory.

A White Paper written on our MANET capabilities received a best paper award at the 25th Army Science Conference, November 2006.

*Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center (or CERDEC) is the United States Army information technologies and integrated systems center.

Seamless Mobility
Telcordia together with Toshiba America Research has been investigating the issues associated with seamless mobility in an IP environment for more than eight years. Our joint work addresses the protocols and optimizations needed to assure uninterrupted user service in a world of heterogeneous network ownership, wireless link technologies, and application protocols. Our protocol work includes contributions in the areas of security, policy, and discovery. The optimization work has systematically examined the delays associated with heterogeneous handover and has produced both optimizations for specific cases and a general framework for studying handover optimizations. For example, we developed Media-independent Pre-Authentication (MPA) as a modular framework that can use a set of protocols for optimizing authentication, security and configuration aspects of the handover. These protocols and the issues surrounding them are currently being studied by the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Internet Research Task Force. Another example is that early in the joint Telcordia and Toshiba research we understood the need for services providing information about networks that might surround a user in any given location and built early prototypes of these services. This work was a key contribution to the work on the information service portion of the IEEE 802.21, Media Independent Handover, standard. IEEE 802.21 is in the final stages of approval. It provides a mechanism for dissemination of policy information as well as optimization hints in a heterogeneous world.

The world of heterogeneous includes not only crossing ownership or administrative boundaries but also crossing technology boundaries. For example, moving from a WiFi network (802.11) to a EVD0 CDMA network or to a 802.16 network. The hardware needed to cross network technology boundaries often implies multiple, independent interfaces. As a user moves location or changes service providers, the quality of service (bandwidth, loss, delay) and cost of the network will change. Telcordia and Toshiba have ongoing efforts that control and utilize multiple interfaces to optimize the service provided to a user.

The IMS architecture relies on both IP mobility and SIP to provide a mobile multimedia service. However, the IMS architecture does not specify the optimizations needed to provide seamless service. Together with KDDI, a large Japanese service provider, we are studying the application of link layer, IP, and SIP mobility optimizations to IMS systems. Via modeling and experimental testbeds, we are demonstrating how to provide handover service in heterogeneous networking environments that is comparable to that provided by current cellular systems. Telcordia is also investigating service orchestration, brokering, and service interaction management in a IMS architecture with multiple service providers.