1. Part A: TCP/IP and Transport Layer Enhancements
   
2. Part B: Next-Generation Middleware Platforms
   
3. Part C: MAC Design for Mobile Pervasive Ad hoc Networking
   

This section of the tutorial will review TCP/IP with emphasis on the transport layer and the impact that defacto standard layer physical layer technologies such as Ethernet has on them. A review of existing and proposed alternative transport layer protocols will be provided as well as an overview of research we are doing at the University of Manitoba.

To address these requirements, recent research has focused on the development of new scalable, efficient, and flexible "next generation" middleware platforms. These middleware platforms are intended to support the deployment of wide-area applications such as Content delivery networks and Video-on demand. One such next-generation middleware platform is the Grid computing system. A Grid is a virtual framework that allows resources across national and international boundaries to interoperate and share capacities in a controlled fashion to form scalable systems.

This talk introduces the concept of Grid computing and includes the various different motivations for developing Grid systems. In particular, we emphasize on the use of Grid computing systems for supporting wide-area applications by providing a resource provisioning framework. Architectures of existing Grid systems is also presented. Following the discussion of the architectures, the talk will examine the different issues in developing and deploying a large-scale middleware as the Grid system.

To illustrate some of the research issues involved in Grid systems, we discuss resource discovery, dissemination, scheduling and security issues in this context. Simple examples will be used to highlight the issues and the methods developed to address them. Time permitting, we will demonstrate some of the concepts using an advanced Grid prototype that is being developed at TRLabs and University of Manitoba.

MAC protocols play an important role in the performance of the wireless ad hoc networks. A MAC protocol defines how each mobile unit can share the very limited wireless bandwidth resource in an efficient manner. Recent researches in this area have focused on designing MAC protocols with optimized performance metrics including throughput, delay, fairness, stability, support for multimedia and power efficiency.

In this section of the tutorial, a thorough survey of all the existing medium access control approaches is presented. The most of the complexity in MAC design for wireless ad hoc networks arises due to node mobility and link vulnerability. A series of studies on MAC design has been conducted to improve medium access performance in different aspects as identified by the different performance metrics. Tradeoffs among the different performance metrics (such as between throughput and fairness) dictate the design of a suitable MAC protocol. We compare the different proposed MAC approaches, identify their problems, and discuss the possible remedies. To this end, the interactions among the MAC and the higher layer protocols such as routing and transport layer protocols are discussed. We also shed light on some of our current research efforts in this area.