CS&M ⇒  Home Prospective Students Staff List Research Information Conferences and Workshops Industrial Liaison Vacancies Alumni Contact Us Other Links

Computing Science Current Student Information Computing Science Seminars

Maths and Stats Group M&SG Home Page Mathematics Seminars Statistical Service

Natural Sciences School Home Page

The University University Home Page Student/Staff Portal Succeed WebCT

Communications and Services

The Communications and Services research group has a wide ranging interest in service engineering across an array of network technologies, including voice, home and data networks. Key interests include service oriented architecture, service creation, and feature or service interaction.

However the group also has a communications leaning, for example P2P overlays and more recently their role within mobile communications. The group has an interest in the programmability of Wireless Sensor Networks and is investigating this in wind farm and home care settings. 

Often the focus of our work is on the control of networked resources using software services. This includes the use of policies as a means to control service behaviour in a more abstract and user-oriented way. The group has experience with services controlling:

• calls in telephony (POTS, Intelligent Network, Interactive Voice Response)
• sessions in Voice over IP (Session Initiation Protocol, H.323)
• the behaviour of networked appliances (UPnP, Jini, X.10, OSGi)
• Web and Grid applications.
• Wireless Sensor Networks.

Furthermore, the group investigates the integration of these diverse services to achieve added value.

Because of the importance of formal methods in the design of complex communications systems, there is commonality of interest with the Applied Formal Methods research group. There are also an overlapping interest with the Care Technologies Research group in the use of networks to support home care.

Staff

• Marwan Fayad
• Mario Kolberg
• Evan Magill
• Dave Marples
• Kevin Swingler
• Ken Turner

For members of the group there is also a private group page.

Research Students

• Faisal Abidin
• Farida Chowdhury
• Jamie Furness
• Claire Maternaghan

Current and Recent Visitors

• Prof. Rui Crespo (University of Lisbon, Portugal), April-July 2008
• Prof. Luigi Logrippo (University of Quebec, Canada), January 2007 and April 2007

Current and Recent Projects

• ACCENT (Advanced Call Control Enhancing Network Technologies), September 2001 - March 2005, Mitel Networks Corp. and EPSRC (GR/R31263). This project investigated the use of policies for call processing, particularly for Internet telephony. It developed a call control language for defining user policies, for analysing conflicts in these, and for supporting policies in an operational environment.
• ACCESS (Adapting Call Control-Enabled SoftSwitches), March 2003 - March 2005, TTI (TCS, grant 4132) and edNET. Work in this project focused on call control for softswitches. It aimed to enhance Voice over IP (Internet Telephony) call control functions within the Vocal Vovida implementation, and to add further call control services to Vocal.
• CAPP (Controlling Appliances with Pen and Paper) This project investigates the use of digital Pen and Paper (using Anoto technology) to control Networked Appliances. The project aims to integrate the Pen and Paper interface with an OSGi (Open Services Gateway Initiative) gateway.
• DAMES (Data Management for e-Social Science) is a project between the group, the Department of Applied Social Science, and The University of Glasgow. The group is addressing Grid Enabled Specialist Data Environments to provide access to specialist data on occupations, on educational qualifications, and on ethnicity.
• Feature Interaction Handling between Services controlling Networked Appliances. This project is developing an approach to handle feature interactions between services controlling networked household appliances. Key to the approach is that service interactions are caused not only by communications over a network, but also via changes of environmental aspects, such as movement, temperature and noise. The approach is implemented on an OSGi (Open Services Gateway Initiative) gateway controlling X.10 and UPnP appliances.
• GEODE (Grid Enabled Occupational Data Environment), October 2005 - March 2007, ESRC. The GEODE project studied the technologies behind the handling of ‘occupational information’ within the social science research community. Occupational information refers to summary statistics and data which are associated with particular occupational positions. Such information is used by many social research projects, but is not always available in an easily accessible form. The GEODE project used ‘eScience’ and ‘Grid’ technologies to facilitate access to occupational information. These technologies involve a particular form of (newly emerging) computing resource – indeed, a wider intention of the project is to develop and promote these technologies as examples of ‘eSocial Science’. This aspect of the project involved collaborations with the UK's National e-Science Centre and with the ESRC's National Centre for eSocial Science.
• InterLife (ESRC grant ES/F042116/1, December 2008 - November 2011). This project is developing support environments based upon Second Life. The InterLife project will focus on supporting children and young adults in developing skills to manage the risks and threats encountered during Educational and Social transitions. This will be achieved through a mobile virtual environment called InterLife which will be developed from and beyond the popular Second Life virtual world. A significant feature of the environment will be the ability to interact with and between real and virtual communities, enabled by the design of a distinctive communication architecture. Communication devices can be both real and virtual. InterLife will provide reflective and personal development tools to be used collaboratively within an avatar-based (customisable virtual persona) environment. This work is a collaboration between the group and the Education Facility at the University of Glasgow.
• MATCH (Mobilising Advanced Technologies for Care at Home), November 2005 - October 2009, SFC (Scottish Funding Council - HR04016). MATCH is a collaborative research project focused on technologies for care at home. The project has specialised expertise in:
  • home care networks
  • lifestyle monitoring
  • speech communication
  • assistive technology (devices for disabilities).
  The project is a collaboration among the Universities of Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Stirling (lead partner) as well as 11 external partners.
• PAM (Personalised Ambient Monitoring; EPSRC grant EP/F003684/1, October 2007 - September 2010.) The PAM project is investigating the use of sensor based systems to reduce the incidence of debilitating episodes for the mentality ill. The focus will be to help within the home and the community. The project started in late 2007 and will run for three years.  This work builds on existing work in rule-based Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) carried out by the group. The work is in collaboration with The University of Southampton's Institute of Sound and Vibration Research (ISVR), its Centre for Operational Research, Management Science and Information Systems (CORMSIS), and The University of Nottingham. The investigators provide skills and experience across medical devices and sensors, medical signal processing, communications and software services, and Operational Research modelling. This mix is essential to the success of the project, and provides an interesting and distinct interdisciplinary grouping.
• PROSEN (Networking of Distributed Sensors for Proactive Condition Monitoring of Wind Turbines), October 2005 - November 2008, EPSRC C014804. This project was a collaboration with the universities of Kent, Essex, Lancaster, and Strathclyde. The project was also supported by external partners Agilent, Insensys, ITI Energy, Macom Technologies, NEL, Scottish Power and TES.
  The major objectives of the project were:
  • to demonstrate practical methods that have the potential to increase the mean time between failure of large-scale sensor arrays
  • to facilitate re-configuration of the arrays to meet unexpected new needs
  • to make fundamental contributions to the emerging field of proactive system management research.
• Sysnet are collaborating with the group in a KTP (006698, April 2008 - October 2009).  This brings together the expertise in P2P (Peer to Peer) technologies of the group, and the mobile phone experience of Sysnet. The goal is to develop a P2P framework for mobile handsets, three sample applications, and a toolkit to enable third parties to develop their own applications.
• Waiter there really is a computer in my soup and it's telephoning me!": Revealing invisible computers. (Public Engagement Project; EPSRC grant EP/H047379/1, September 2010 - December 2011.). This project is a collaboration with the School of Education at the University of Glasgow, RSAMD, and Glasgow Science Centre.
  The goal is to produce a science show at the Glasgow Science Centre about innovations in computers and communications arising from current research. In particular we want to describe the synergy between these technologies and sensors. The show will combine interactive demonstrations with strong audience participation. Also, in collaboration with the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (RSAMD), we will introduce a theatrical element to ensure an attractive event for audiences. Crucially the show will be sustainable with delivery continuing beyond the project end date.
  The proposed show will be under an hour long and held in the Science Show Theatre within the centre. It will be part of the regular weekend and holiday science show programme held in the Science Show Theatre attended by thousands of visitors each year. In addition the show will be integrated into the schools and community outreach programmes with appropriate educational materials for both introductory and reinforcing post-show activity support packs.

Research Activities

Members of the research group work on a number of different aspects of communications and services:

• Service oriented Architecture with supporting theory, techniques, and tools is of particular interest. The telecommunications world has seen rapid changes due to deregulation, internationalisation, distributed service provision, and new multimedia services. Web and Grid services have become widespread. Soundly-based, practical techniques and tools for engineering services have thus become critical. With the support of several companies, members of the group developed an architectural basis for constructing a wide variety of services. The techniques and tools have been proven using a range of voice and data services.
• Service Creation research has been carried by group members together with a variety of telecommunications organisations across Europe. Service creation traditionally was driven by the network operator. However, with technologies such as Parlay, SIP (Voice over IP), Web/Grid services and Networked Appliances, services will be created by a number of different parties including the end user. Besides having experience in the creation of traditional voice services, the group has extensive experience in service creation approaches for multimedia services based on the TINA architecture, Voice over IP architectures such as SIP and H.323, VoiceXML, and Web/Grid services.
• Feature Interaction Handling is a particular research interest of the group. The group was the first to study and classify the new kinds of feature interactions that can arise in multimedia services. Members of the group, together with Telcordia Technologies, were first to analyse the problem of services controlling networked appliances. The approaches developed to address the feature interaction problem include those which can be applied during all stages of the service life cycle and in a number of different target environments. The group has developed filtering, off-line, run-time and hybrid approaches. Targeted environments include traditional telephony, Voice over IP environments (SIP), Interactive Voice Response, Networked Appliances, and Web/Grid services.
• Peer to Peer (P2P) is a growing area within the group. P2P overlay networks do not require central server components, unlike client-server systems. P2P systems are self-managing, in that they can cope with nodes leaving and joining at a high rate. The group's focus has been on structured P2P overlay networks. Structured P2P systems use a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) as a means to organise nodes into a structure that assigns data items to particular nodes. Structured P2P systems can be classified as either multi hop or single hop. If more than one hop is required to send a message from source to destination node, the system is referred to as a multi hop system. However, as each link in the overlay network corresponds to a path in the underlying IP network, this approach can result in poor latency. With an alternative approach, the destination node can be reached with a single hop. To do so, each node maintains a routing table containing entries for all other nodes in the system. The improvement in the latency for lookups is traded against an increased amount of maintenance traffic keeping the routing tables in all the nodes up to date. The group's focus has been on improving the performance of one hop overlays by employing a multicast approach (XCAST). The group has also designed and implemented a variable hop overlay (Chameleon) where nodes can adapt the algorithm according to the bandwidth currently available.
• Networked Appliances Networked appliances are attracting increasing interest, and the first selected products are now available. Networked appliances are dedicated consumer devices which contain a network processor and are controlled by software services. Particularly interesting is the control of appliances using software services. Research has included devices employing a variety of protocols for communication, e.g. UPnP (Universal Plug and Play), X.10, and Jini. The most added value will be gained through integration of appliances with various means of communication, such as the WWW (World Wide Web) and telephony. The group has researched the provisioning and integration of services on an OSGi (Open Services Gateway) platform.
• Wireless Sensor Networks are an extremely active area. Our focus is on the control and programmability of WSNs. For the former we have developed a policy-based management system. For the latter we have investigated different rule engines embedded within the network. More recently we have also been combining a rule engine with mobile phones and WSNs.
• Virtual Worlds is a recent area of interest. Our focus here is on linking multi-user 3-D virtual worlds such as Second Life with real physical devices. We are not interested in using these devices to provide small (and inadequate) windows into virtual worlds. Rather we want to provide a persistent "connection" between the user and in-world events. Hence we are developing an infrastructure that allows events and information in-world to be displayed on real-devices. We also aim to allow users to influence events in-world without logging on to a conventional PC.

The group has achieved international and national standing. Results of our work are frequently published in international conferences and scholarly journals and magazines. Members of the group serve on program committees of major conferences and act as editors for respected journals. For instance, the premier international forum for feature interaction is the International Conference on Feature Interactions in Software and Communications Systems series of events. The group has made significant contributions to these events, both in terms of papers and organisation; the group co-chaired the May 2000 running of this series. In recognition of the key role of telecommunications service engineering, Stirling was responsible for the EPSRC engineering network called FORCES (Forum for Creation and Engineering of Telecommunications Services). Stirling also leads the MATCH home care research collaboration between the Universities of Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Stirling.