I am a third year PhD student in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow. I am interested in inter-domain routing, the redundant information required to sustain inter-domain routing, and analysis of mechanisms to achieve more compact routing in future.
Supervised by Colin Perkins, I am a member of the embedded, networked and distributed systems (ENDS) research group. From July 2008 to December 2008, I was a 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.
Previously, I was a research associate in the ENDS research group at Glasgow, working on the AMUSe (Autonomic Management of Ubiquitous Systems for e-Health) project, 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.
I have also worked on some science communication projects aiming to bridge the gap between Computing Science at university, and the computing courses offered in primary/secondary education.
Research Interests
I am interested in routing and future Internet architectures, the study of the existing Internet architecture, support mechanisms for group communication (such as peer-to-peer conferencing applications, DHTs, IP Multicast), and support mechanisms for connection establishment (such as ICE).
I am further interested in routing algorithms and their scaling properties (e.g., memory requirments per node, bandwidth between nodes). I am currently evaluating the applicability of different compact routing schemes with respect to the known relationship structure of the autonomous system (AS) graph.
Previous work has focussed on autonomous management of systems in ubiquitous environments, and the software services required to facilitate said management; my primary focus in this work was on event distribution and discovery services.
Ancillary Duties
Currently, I also perform the following tasks:
- Undergraduate lab demonstrating: This year, I'll be demonstrating on two modules: AP3 (Advanced Programming) and NS3 (Networked Systems).
- Masters project supervision: I am co-supervising one MSci student this year, looking at the evaluation of compact routing schemes on the Internet.
- Student Recruitment: I run campus tours during the regular applicant information sessions scheduled by the University.
Previously, I have also done:
- Undergraduate lab demonstrating in the following modules: C3 (C programming); the Unix crash course; NSA3 (Network Systems Architecture); NS3 (Networked Systemd); and OS3 (Operating Systems).
- ENDS Seminar coordination: I organised and led the weekly departmental Embedded, Networked, and Distributed Systems group seminars.
- Exam marking: I marked the final exam for one advanced undergraduate module.
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).