Date: january 31st

Place: Amphitheater A.5.2 of DEEC

Prof. David Tipper, University of Pittsburgh, USA

Talk I: Smart Grid Communications Reliability Issues

Talk II: A New Approach to Providing Quality of Resilience Classes 

Short Bio: David Tipper is a Professor in the School of Computing and Information at the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA. From 2007 to 2016 he served as the Director of the Graduate Telecommunications and Networking Program. He is a graduate of the University of Arizona (PhD Electrical Engineering, MS Systems Engineering) and Virginia Tech (BS Electrical Engineering). His research interests are network design, network reliability, performance analysis techniques, and information security. Professor Tipper's research has been supported by grants from various government and corporate sources such as NSF, DARPA, NIST, IBM, ARO and AT&T. Recent professional activities include serving as co-guest editor of a special issue on Advances in Network Planning which appeared in IEEE Communications Magazine – January and February of 2014, and of the journal Telecommunication Systems special issue on Reliable Networks Design and Modeling which appeared February, 2013. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=XD9kMgEAAAAJ

Talk I: Smart Grid Communications Reliability Issues

Abstract: The smart grid is envisioned as the next generation power grid that provides advanced electricity generation, distribution and management, utilizing the latest information and communication technologies to enable real-time load and control capabilities from the point of generation to the end user consumption point.Providing reliable and secure communications among the grid components is considered a basic property that must be provided for the smart grid to function.  In this talk, Smart Grid power systems are overviewed and the communication networks that enable them. Further we discuss the standardization efforts and proposed  reliability requirements and cybersecurity issues posed by  smart grid communication networks.

Talk II: A New Approach to Providing Quality of Resilience Classes 

Abstract:  There is an increasing need for supporting services with high resilience requirements over future communications networks. For example, public safety emergency calls, networked medical systems and smart power grid communications. From a service provider’s perspective, there is a need to support classes of quality of resilience (QoR) in a fashion similar to quality of service classes. The basic concept is to categorize traffic into classes and provide different levels of availability and fault protection for each class. The goal of providing QoR classes is to just meet availability requirements without over-engineering the network. In this talk, we introduce a novel method for providing QoR classes that simplifies the network design and achieves both high resilience and differentiation. Our approach, utilizes the spine concept of embedding a sub-network at the physical layer with comparatively high availability link and node values. This lays a foundation for differentiation between multiple classes of flows. Then, cross layer mapping and spine-aware routing are performed in a way that transfers this differentiation capability to the upper layer network and flows. We provide two joint routing-mapping optimization formulations and evaluate their performance in a multilayer scenario showing the advantages of our approach.