The Telecommunication Networks and Telematics (TNT) Lab is a joint research laboratory between the Electrical, Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering and Naval Architecture Department (DITEN) at the University of Genoa, and the National Inter-University Consortium for Telecommunications (CNIT). Its staff is composed by Prof. Raffaele Bolla (head of the TNT Lab.), Prof. Franco Davoli, two CNIT scientists (Roberto Bruschi and Matteo Repetto), and 9 further persons among Ph.D. students, research fellows, and highly specialized engineers. The main research topic addressed by the TNT Lab is in the field of the “Future Internet” and related technologies.
In this respect, the latest specific research efforts undertaken by the TNT Lab regard: Energy-efficiency in ICT, Green Networking, Smart Grid, Distributed Router Architectures, Multi-core Linux SW Routers, Monitoring, Traffic and Network Models, Planning and Control Mechanisms, Network processors and custom smart boards; Continuous and cross-ambient communications, Ad hoc Networks, Vehicular Traffic Estimation through Mobile Networks, Mobility Management.
The TNT Lab is the center of a number of research initiatives and projects funded by national and international industries and industrial fora (GeSI), standardization bodies (ITU-T), the European Commission, and the Italian government. The TNT Lab research heads are principal investigators in many of these research projects (among the most recent ones we can cite the EU FP7 ECONET Integrated Project, of which Prof. R. Bolla is the coordinator and principal investigator, the national “PRIN” project EFFICIENT, coordinated by Prof. F. Davoli, and the GreenNet “FIRB-young researchers” project, coordinated by Dr. R. Bruschi).
The TNT Lab. is actively collaborating with a number of industrial companies as Telecom Italia, NetLogic MicroSystems, Alcatel-Lucent, and Ericsson among the others. The general research approach aims at covering the complete cycle of the research and innovation process: the staff activities starts from measurement campaigns on real network infrastructures of device prototypes, go through the design of theoretical models and optimization mechanisms, and arrive to the realization of in-house prototypes.
To this purpose, the laboratory is equipped with professional instrumentation (among others, 3 router testers, 10 SW routers, Netlogic and Intel network processor evaluation boards, remote watt-meters, high precision multimeters and DAQs, OpenFlow switches, etc.).