The study of new and fundamental design methods, models and techniques that enable automated, coordinated and cross-layer transitions between functionally similar mechanisms within a communication system is the main goal of a collaborative research center funded by the German research foundation (DFG). The DFG collaborative research center 1053 MAKI - Multi-mechanism Adaptation for the future Internet - focuses on research questions in the following areas: (i) Fundamental research on transition methods, (ii) Techniques for adapting transition-capable communication systems on the basis of achieved and targeted quality, and (iii) specific and exemplary transitions in communication systems as regarded from different technical perspectives. A formalization of the concept of transitions that captures the features and relations within a communication system to express and optimize the decision making process that is associated with such a system is given in. The associated building blocks comprise (i) Dynamic
Software Product Lines, (ii)
Markov Decision Processes and (iii)
Utility Design. While Dynamic Software Product Lines provide a method to concisely capture a large configuration space and to specify run time variability of adaptive systems, Markov Decision Processes provide a mathematical tool to define and plan transitions between available communication mechanisms. Finally, utility functions quantify the performance of individual configurations of the transition-based communication system and provide the means to optimize the performance in such a system. Applications of the idea of transitions have found their way to
wireless sensor networks and mobile networks, distributed
reactive programming, WiFi
firmware modification, planning of autonomic computing systems, analysis of
CDNs, flexible extensions of the ISO
OSI stack,
5G mmWave vehicular communications, the analysis of
MapReduce-like parallel systems, scheduling of
Multipath TCP, adaptivity for beam training in
802.11ad, operator placement in dynamic user environments,
DASH video player analysis,
adaptive bitrate streaming and
complex event processing on mobile devices. == References ==