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

CloudFilter: Practical Confinement of Sensitive Data Across Clouds (funded by Dstl and EPSRC 2012-2013)
Security considerations are a practical obstacle for the adoption of cloud computing. Cloud providers consolidate data from multiple services, which may result in wide-spread data disclosure when their security is compromised. The CloudFilter project aims to explore novel methods for exercising control over sensitive data propagation across multiple cloud providers. The expected outcome is a practical solution that allows clients and cloud providers to control the sensitivity of data that is transferred across their systems and to prevent user actions that would violate data dissemination policies.
DISSP: Dependable Internet-Scale Stream Processing (funded by EPSRC 2008-2012)
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 EPSRC 2008-2012) 
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.
Mobile Services for Cloud Computing (funded by Orange Labs UK 2009-2012)
Mobile applications on smartphones have to execute in an environment with limited CPU, memory and storage resources, while providing a good user experience. In this project, we explore how mobile applications can benefit from remote resources in cloud data centres. We investigate how a middleware can automatically partition applications to execute parts of applications remotely. This can improve performance and reduce power consumption of mobile devices by exploiting computational and storage resources in data centres.
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.
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