Third year PhD student in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow. Supervised by Colin Perkins. Member of the embedded, networked and distributed systems (ENDS) research group.
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Research Interests
The Internet is facing various technical concerns in both the short and long term: an increasingly fragmented IPv4 address space with an expanding ipv6 address space; an increasingly mobile userbase placing additional requirements on an existing infrastructure; and an increasingly volumous stream of prefix updates and withdrawals.
I am investigating mechanisms to enable more compact inter-domain routing as the network continues to grow. I am interested in scalable inter-domain routing in terms of the state required to facilitate packet forwarding, and in terms of the communication overhead to maintain that distributed state. I am also interested in our current infrastructure: the redundant information present in current BGP deployments, the implications of IPv4 address exhaustion on state explosion and ipv6 adoption, and the implications of continued NAT deployment for applications.
Formerly
July 2008 -- December 2008: Research engineer at the Nokia Research Centre in Espoo, Finland, studying real-life NAT deployment, and the protocol suite favoured by the IETF for achieving NAT traversal between peers (ICE, TURN, STUN). The work involved setting up a platform to interrogate point-to-point network connections, in cooperation with software deployed on Symbian handsets, using an existing cross-platform implementation of ICE.
September 2005 -- May 2007: Research associate in the ENDS research group at the University of Glasgow, working on the AMUSe in collaboration with Imperial College London. My work on AMUSe focussed mainly on the implementation and integration of some of the core services supporting autonomous management in varying scenarios: from wireless environments with a central processor no more powerful than a PDA, to national wide-area networks. More information on my AMUSe work can be found here.
Also: A handful of science communication projects aiming to bridge the gap between Computing Science at university, and the computing courses offered in primary/secondary education.
Ancillary Duties
I have taken on various additional responsibilities at various points. These are:
- Undergraduate lab demonstrating: I have demonstrated in labs for the following classes: AP3 (Advanced Programming); C3 (C programming); NS3 (Networked Systems); NSA3 (Network Systems Architecture); OS3 (Operating Systems 3); and the Unix crash course.
- Supervision: I have supervised students in the Honours and Masters years of their education.
- ENDS Seminar coordination: I organised and chaired weekly group seminars.
- Exam marking: I marked the final exam for one advanced undergraduate module.
- Student Recruitment: I run campus tours during the regular applicant information sessions scheduled by the University.
Education
- 2007 -- current: PhD in Computing Science, University of Glasgow
Working thesis title: "Analysis & Reduction of Inter-Domain Forwarding State" - 2000 -- 2005: M.Sci. in Computing Science, University of Glasgow
I graduated 1st class from the 5-year M.Sci. programme at the University of Glasgow in 2005. My Master's thesis title was simply "Peer-to-Peer Audio Conferencing," and presents Orta, a network overlay protocol intended to allow group conferencing with real-time applications. (e.g., VoIP).