Welcome

In recent years, we have witnessed new global applications, consisting of thousands of computers and potentially supporting millions of users. Examples include world-wide information dissemination systems, "intelligent" cities with many fixed and mobile devices, global scientific experiments spanning continents, large-scale sensor network deployments for environmental and infrastructure monitoring, peer-to-peer applications for resource sharing and planetary-scale Internet services.

The goal of our research group is to support the architecture and engineering of tomorrow's scalable and robust Internet-wide systems. We investigate new abstractions and infrastructures for building global applications and want to address algorithmic and data management challenges that are unique to this  domain. Much of our work follows a multi-disciplinary approach, creating links between distributed systems, networking and database research.

Current Research Projects

DISSP - Dependable Internet-Scale Stream Processing (funded by the EPSRC 2008-2011)
In the DISSP project, we investigate techniques for reliably processing large amounts of stream data coming from globally distributed sources, such as sensor networks. In order for a global stream processing system to provide a robust service to thousands of users, we develop approaches that degrade processing quality in a controlled fashion in response to resource shortages caused by failure or overload.
SmartFlow - Extendable Event-Based Middleware (funded by the EPSRC 2008-2011)
Current middleware is unable to adapt to the special requirements of healthcare applications in terms of auditing, controlled information flow, privacy and access control. The SmartFlow project investigates a lightweight architecture for building messaging middleware from a set of dynamic middleware extensions. Healthcare applications can express their requirements as extensions and push them into an intelligent middleware layer, simplifying applications design and improving performance.
Ukairo - Application-specific Detour Routing
Distributed Internet applications would like to control the quality-of-service (QoS) properties of the communication paths that they use. In the Ukairo project, we investigate scalable detour routing algorithms that can improve Internet QoS properties, such as available bandwidth, loss, latency and jitter, by carefully selecting detour hops in an overlay network. The goal is to enable Internet applications to receive their own, custom-tailored Internet routes.
Flexible Future Networks (funded by the Mobile VCE and the EPSRC 2009-2010)
Pyxida / Network Coordinates for Internet Applicatons
Network coordinates (NCs) embed latency measurements between Internet nodes in a metric coordinate system. We have evaluated NCs as a means for performing nearest neighbour lookups on the Internet. Our research has led to new evaluation metrics and techniques for improving their accuracy and stability. In addition, we have experimented with geometric overlay routing using NCs. In the Pyxida project, we provide an open source implementation of NCs and run a public network coordinate service on PlanetLab.
Syndicate content