InfoLab21

The Faroes Auroral All-Sky Imager

Jim Wild - Communication Systems - Lancaster University Research Committee - £9,823.

This project involves the deployment and operation of a state-of-the-art auroral all-sky imager (ASI) at a field site in the Faroe Islands.

The ASI will record panchromatic images of the night sky with a cadence of approximately ten seconds. The resulting auroral observations will be compared to satellite measurements of the near-Earth space plasma environment in order to investigate the onset mechanism of magnetospheric substorms - the explosive release of energy stored in the Earth's magnetic tail.

System Issues For Virtual Routers

Laurent Mathy - Computing - EPSRC - £269,954 Routers are the fundamental devices that enable and orchestrate the movement of data in the Internet.

Traditionally, logic (software) and platform (hardware) have been tightly bundled into a single device. The goal of this project is to provide a sort of 'meccanno router' by decoupling the router logic from the hardware platform so that a single device could behave as multiple and independent routers, or multiple devices could coordinate to provide the functionality of a single router.

Such logic/hardware decoupling will enable the construction of high-performance and resilient routing devices that are much more affordable through the use of cheap, readily available, and often surplus to requirement equipment, which, in turn, will also enable new functionality that might previously have been too expensive to support in traditional routers.

This project is a collaboration between the Computing Department at Lancaster University and the Computer Science Department at University College London.

Follow-On Research With Telekom Austria

David Hutchinson - Computing, Telekom Austria, £215,088

Overlay networks are a compelling way of deploying services (e.g., Skype); the opportunities and threats posed by overlays will be investigated. For instance, it is important to determine the scalability of emerging overlay-based service provisioning platforms.

In the longer-term, architectures will be explored that enable cross-layer interaction between the underlying network and overlays, leading to potential new sources of revenue and service provisioning strategies for Telekom Austria.

VERA: Verifiable Aspect Models for Middleware Product Families

Awais Rashid - Computing, EPSRC, £19,452The overall aim of the VERA project is to develop a modelling framework for verifiable composition of aspect models pertaining to middleware families.

The framework will use aspect-orientated techniques to separate common features in a middleware product family from variable features. This separation facilitates flexible creation of product family members by composing aspect models describing variable features with a base model describing common features.

The framework will also support evaluation of alternative forms of variable features to support trade-off decision making.

Funding Success

Resident InfoLab21 company m-ventions has provided funding for an industrial studentship in novel interfaces for Mobile Applications. Started by Communication Systems' Reuben Edwards and Paul Coulton, m-ventions develops mobile applications and are the people behind RFID-enabled PAC-MAN game PAC-LAN among other projects.

www.m-ventions.com

Thu 03 August 2006