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New research projects for Computing and Communications

InfoLab21, the home of Lancaster's School of Computing and Communications (SCC) InfoLab21, the home of Lancaster's School of Computing and Communications (SCC)

Academics in Lancaster University's School of Computing and Communications have secured major funding and a key role in two new research projects announced by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). For more information, contact Prof. David Hutchison (d.hutchison@lancaster.ac.uk) in SCC.

Towards Ultimate Convergence of All Networks (TOUCAN)

The £12M, five-year TOUCAN project seeks to address the ever-growing global demand for broadband communications and also connectivity for the so-called "Internet of Things (IoT)". Lancaster, Edinburgh, Heriot-Watt and Bristol Universities will each be contributing unique research strengths alongside key industry partners in telecommunications and networking.

It is forecast that by 2020 the number of network-connected devices will reach 1000 times the world's population while data volumes transported over networks will progressively grow to Zettabytes and beyond, with High-Definition quality routinely streamed to mobile devices.

This spectrum of challenges will necessitate radically new network models. TOUCAN is intended to drive the commoditisation of network devices, with any new technology generation - whether wired or wireless - being able to connect to the TOUCAN network in a plug-and-play fashion. Research into the new network models will also ensure key properties of security and resilience, areas in which Lancaster has particular interests and strengths.

A Situation-Aware Information Infrastructure

As part of the "TI3 (Towards Intelligent Information Infrastructures)" programme, this project aims to equip future networks with "situational awareness", which is knowledge that can help make management decisions about networks and their services in the face of any challenges, whether from (e.g.) component failures, natural disasters, mis-configurations or attacks. Making future networks resilient is supremely important and is a major research activity, especially given the critical nature of networks and the services they support for many areas of society. In this project, research will be carried out over two years jointly at Lancaster and Glasgow Universities, involving investigators with a wide range of expertise (resilient and autonomic communications, network instrumentation and management, information retrieval and data science), in collaboration with a number of leading industrial partners in the areas of networked safety-critical systems, industrial control networks, and hardware-accelerated custom compute platforms.

Fri 18 July 2014