Networking and communications
Centre for Cyber Security, Communications and Network Research (CSCAN)
Networking represents the underlying driver of the technology and information revolution that we have been witnessing in recent years. The expansion of the internet in complexity, size, speed, and number of users, coupled with the evolution of network applications provided the necessary environment for innovation and progress. In this context, research is vital to design, implement, and test novel networking concepts and paradigms, the infrastructure provides the necessary support for new applications, and the users, whether individuals, companies, or machines, are receiving the necessary resources and are able to interact in a secure manner.
The research within CSCAN has focused on a number of areas to support the above expansion, from designing new concepts and architecture for the networking domain, including IoT, mobility, video delivery, adaptive transport algorithms to name a few, to monitoring network and application performance and ensuring user fairness and satisfaction.
Research themes:
- network monitoring, QoS and QoE
- multimedia services delivery
- SDN and NFV
- IoT and smart environments
- service orchestration and management
- user profiling and fairness
- Cloud, fog, and edge services
- application identification
- wireless networks optimisation.
Project insights
Network traffic and user activities profiling
The Internet has become a large and complex collection of networks, transporting bandwidth-greedy applications, typically encrypted, for users with increasing demands. In this environment, it becomes critical to be able to identify applications and establish users and their associated needs in order to fairly distribute the existing network resources. The undertaken research projects investigated how the user network activities can be grouped and identified in order to inform network management about resource allocation and alert security entities about anomalies detected in user activity or traffic.
Links for more information:
Network management for optimising video quality of experience
Content on the Internet is increasingly moving towards video transmissions, ranging from real-time communication or conferencing to subscription-based video on demand or archived videos. To cope with the increasing demand, service providers must be able to infer the network conditions and adapt to them in order to provide an optimal quality of experience. The research projects focused on inferring the characteristics of both the video and the infrastructure (more specifically bandwidth and packet loss) to optimise the video transmission specifically by informing the video providers of these characteristics so they can determine what video information would match best the available resources.
Links for more information:
http://dl.ifip.org/db/conf/cnsm/cnsm2019/1570564936.pdf
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-13-2622-6_29
Optimising service delivery and security for IoT and M2M communication
Recent years have witnessed a significant interest for the area of Machine to Machine communication (M2M) to support the creation of smart environments. To move further away from depending on a central, single point of failure, peer-to-peer (P2P) provides an appealing option for a resilient, distributed infrastructure that can provide the users with more complex, on demand services. Aside from its benefits, an P2P M2M environment poses a number of challenges to aggregate services and to ensure the trustworthiness of component and content providers. The undertaken research investigated how services can be provisioned and orchestrated in a trustworthy fashion, while maintaining an open environment based on multiple providers and consumers.
Links for more information:
