Networks and Distributed Systems

This theme focuses on the design and optimisation of networks and distributed systems, including multimedia networking, mobile systems, and high-performance heterogeneous distributed systems.

Distributed Systems consists of a collection of autonomous computers, connected through a network and managed with distributed system software that coordinates their activities so that users perceive the system to be a single, integrated computing facility. Advances in this area have allowed us tackle computational expensive tasks without the associated financially expense of super computing resources. Related activities in this sub-theme include: Parallel computing which looks at the management of tasks across multiple processors; Grid computing which emphasises the distribution of these task across separate computers on the Internet, thus mitigated the need for expensive supercomputers; and Heterogeneous computing which focuses on the complexities of distributing tasks across heterogeneous computing environments.

Next Generation Networks comprise of a high-capacity optical fibre core with a diverse set of wired and wireless access options. These new networks give rise to many interesting research challenges including how to maximise the performance of new wireless access technologies and how to deliver large amounts of high quality video in a scalable manner. CSI researchers are developing new wireless access solutions based on multi-hop wireless network architecture to address the complex problems associated with the delivery of quality services in an urban environment.

Publication Summary:

• Fitzpatrick, J., Murphy, S., Atiquzzaman, M. and Murphy, J. (2008) ECHO: A Quality of Service based Endpoint Centric Handover scheme for VoIP IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC) 2008 , pp.2777-2782 [Details]
• Le-Khac, N.A. and Aouad, L. and Kechadi, M-T. (2008) 'An Efficient Knowledge Management Tool for Distributed Data Mining Environments'. International Journal of Computational Intelligence Research, .  [Details]
• Hudzia, B. and Kechadi, M-T. and Ottewill, A. (2005) TreeP: A Tree-Based P2P Network Architecture International Workshop on Algorithms, Models and tools for parallel computing on heterogeneous networks (HeteroPar'05) Boston, Massachusetts, USA,  [Details]
• C. Doherty, N.J. Hurley, T.Cox, R. Brennan, S. Collins (2005) Towards Grid-based NMS Data Management in 3G Networks and Beyond Eurescom Summit 2005, Uniquitous Services and Applications, Exploting the Potential, Heidelberg, 27-29 April, 2005. Heidelberg, [Details]
• A.Lastovetsky and R.Reddy (2004) 'On Performance Analysis of Heterogeneous Parallel Algorithms'. PARALLEL COMPUTING, 30 (11):1195-1216. [Details]
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