Research Areas

The Network Engineering Research Group works in the following areas:

Wireless Networks

We aim to address challenging issues with environmentally friendly energy efficient algorithms and protocols for different forms of wireless networks operating in day-to-day as well as extreme conditions. We develop algorithms, techniques, protocols and systems with the ability to adapt to the changing network conditions, by sensing/observing/measuring network conditions, and applying knowledge that have been made available or acquired previously, to address the dynamically changing network environment.

Specific areas of research and expertise include wireless multihop (ad-hoc, mesh and sensor) networks, quality of service support for multimedia traffic, cognitive networks, and application of theoretical methods to network design and analysis.

Distributed Systems

Current research on Distributed Systems is centred on Grid and Cloud computing. A typical Grid user (Astronomy, Bioinformatics, Environmental Science, Particle physics, etc.) will use the grid system to automatically perform massively parallel computations primarily for data analysis. While the overall Grid goal of providing scientists access to massive amounts of computational power seems at first a simple one, the underlying technologies are the focus of much research in Computer Science and offer many interesting problems that requiring novel research.

Cloud computing is an instantiation of the principles of Utility computing, and we are doing research on the federation of Clouds using economic, or market oriented and autonomic principles. We also have interests in eScience and sensor information processing.

Internet and Internetworking

See Networking Research Lab.

Network and Operating System Security

The focus of our current research in Network and Operating System security is how to improve security for the users who access resources via networks. We contribute to the international Honeynet project and share their goal of learning the tactics and motives involved in computer and network attacks, and sharing the lessons learned. We are interested in the problems of how to monitor and analyse data collected from observing such attacks and using this information to try and prevent future attacks.

Our current work revolves around PC platforms but we are extending our work to include Smartphones and sensors.

Digital preservation

It is unlikely that we would be able to read the Treaty of Waitangi had it been written on a computer using a word processor because the media it was created on and the computer hardware would not have lasted 100 years. The problem of ensuring that resources created electronically are accessible to future generations is becoming a world wide concern as more and more of our documents and artifacts are "born digital". We have been working as part of a multidisciplinary team involving media studies and commercial law on how to conserve digital data and make it accessible in a distributed manner while dealing with both technical and legal constraints.

Our current work revolves around conserving and providing access to New Zealand software created during the 1980s and 1990s.