COST 293 annual conference on GRAphs and ALgorithms in communication networks
GRAAL 2007

Conference Chair: Xavier Muñoz, COST 293 Chairman

This event celebrated in the frame of the COST GRAAL Action in conjunction with ICTON 2007 is organised by members of the Action and it is open to the whole scientific community. This will stimulate mutual interest, promote quality of research through scientific confrontation of results, and contribute to identifying further challenging problems to be investigated, while contributing to the visibility of COST in general, and of COST GRAAL in particular.

The main objective of GRAAL is to elaborate global and solid advances in the design of communication networks by letting experts and researchers with strong mathematical background meet peers specialized in communication networks, and share their mutual experience by forming a multidisciplinary scientific co-operation community.
 
Clearly, the field of network design embraces a wide scope of disciplines. This can be easily understood from the history of modern communication networks which resulted from the gradual merger over the last 25 years between telecommunication networks on the one hand, and computer / digital communication networks on the other hand, with an obvious and fundamental cross-fertilization between disciplines, that can for instance be illustrated by the fact that discrete mathematics, or concepts like computational complexity and approximability, borrowed from the computer science area, are now generally used. Converse cross-fertilization examples could of course be mentioned as well (COST 293 Memorandum of Understanding - Technical Annex)

Conference topics of relevance include but are not limited to:

• Broadband packet network design
• Backbone optical network design
• Multi-layer network design
• Wireless and ad-hoc networks design

The contributions should report on:

• Development of models;
• Simulations and measurements;
• Assessment and validation.

Scientists external to the GRAAL consortium are cordially invited to attend the event with possibility to present their own problems. This co-operation will be useful to both guests and GRAAL. On one hand Scientists external to GRAAL will get not only hints to solve their own problems, but they will also be given the opportunity to experience co-operation between applied and fundamental sciences and to realize its importance. On the other hand, this external co-operation will instill new ideas within the Working Groups from which new results can be produced.

COST 293 is especially seeking interactions with other COST Actions and scientific networks in optical and converged communications present at ICTON 2007. Interaction between fundamental science research areas and communication networks is an important goal of this event.

Paper submission - in WORD and pdf format to icton@itl.waw.pl according to ICTON submission rules available at http://www.itl.waw.pl/icton/, please state 'GRAAL submission' in the subject line when submitting your contribution.

Publication - all accepted GRAAL Conference papers will be included in ICTON 2007 Proceedings (IEEE publication).

COST is an intergovernmental framework for European Co-operation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research, (http://www.cost.esf.org)

COST Action 293 GRAphs and ALgorithms in communication networks GRAAL, http://www.cost293.org