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ICIS emphasizes on both fundamental and applied research and has a good record
of multidisciplinary research in Networking and Software Engineering areas.
We have active research in the following research areas:
Next Generation Internet and Wireless Networking
Overview
The research efforts and activities on networking
in ICIS focus on two major areas: Next Generation Internet and wireless
networking. The objective of this research group is to develop and devise
state-of-the-art network technologies, protocols, equipments, applications and
test-beds in the Internet, wireless networks for research and industrial
purposes.
(1) Next Generation Internet
The Internet has emerged as the major carrier of information, providing support
for various types of applications. On the other hand, the architecture of the
Internet and its protocol machinery continues to be challenged by growing
traffic volumes, more address prefixes, the introduction of new transmission
mediums and the need to deliver revenue-generating services. Default routing,
traffic engineering and policy routing as well as improved scalability must be
engineered into the routing system. The transport layer family of protocols
including TCP continues to be important as developers seek optimal application
throughput and resilience. New paradigms for multicast are being introduced to
address issues related to scalability and complexity. Integrating IP and optical
networking technologies and the ability to provide SONET-like protection and
restoration are being explored. Mechanisms for introducing and internetworking
IPv6 and Ipv4 networks are under development.
It is well recognized that QoS provisioning in IP networks is a very challenging
and hot topic. In this area, we have made substantial progress. The objective is
to develop an efficient QoS provisioning mechanism for TCP/IP network, which has
good scalability and low implementation cost. The new framework includes new
scheduling algorithm, admission control, congestion control schemes, buffer
management schemes and QoS routing protocol.
Another research proposal is on active packets for QoS control and traffic
protection. It is proposed to use active packets that dynamically adapt its QoS
state to varying conditions of the network and rerouting based on the
application QoS requirements for graceful QoS degradation during the congestion
state. The active packets require no state maintenance in the routers and are
topologically routed to optimize on the available network resources. This has
the potentials for ensuring an optimal end-to-end QoS guarantee without the
complexity in the core routers. Through proper QoS modeling and adaptation, it
is expected that end-to-end QoS can be ensured without over provisioning of
resources and traffic protection without significantly sacrificing user’s QoS.
This project identifies 3 focus areas of research in QoS modeling, QoS
adaptation, and QoS control.
In recent years, multicast applications involving data delivery from a single
source to a large number of destinations are emerging in current Internet. How
to address the requirements of these applications efficiently is a hot topic in
the research community. IP multicast and application layer multicast are two
main approaches for providing multicast services. There are many control and
management issues for addressing the large-scale characteristic of multicast
applications. Our research work covers some of these important topics such as
congestion control, loss recovery, buffer management, and group management, etc.
(2) Wireless Networking
In parallel with the development of Internet technologies, wireless networking
technologies, including mobile cellular networks, ad hoc networking, sensor
networks, wireless LAN(WiFi) wireless MAN (WiMAX) etc. have received a lot of
attention in the past few years. As such, numerous new protocols have been
developed that are revolutionizing the way the communication works.
With the convergence of various wireless networks, in recent years, wireless
mesh networking has become an indispensable technique for the next generation
wireless networks. It is critical to large-scale wireless networks with no
pre-existing infrastructure. This technique enables quick-and-easy extension of
a local area network into a wide area. Prior efforts on wireless networks,
especially multi-hop ad hoc networks, have led to significant research
contributions that range from fundamental results on theoretical capacity bounds
to various flavors of routing and transport protocols. However, the work is far
from enough. In this area, we have renewed interests in carrying out research on
MAC protocols and cross-layer design. Other issues we are going to work on
include: Cooperation enhancement and forwarding strategies; Multichannel MACs,
High-performance scalable single-channel MACs; Algorithmic and combinatorial
optimization issues in wireless networks; cross-layer design and optimization;
routing and group communication in ad hoc network; emerging standards: IEEE
802.11s, IEEE 802.15.5, IEEE 802.16 mesh, IEEE 802.20 mesh
The integration of fixed and mobile wireless access into IP networks presents a
cost effective and efficient way to provide seamless end-to-end connectivity and
ubiquitous access in a market where the demand for mobile Internet services has
grown rapidly and predicted to generate billions of dollars in revenue.
Emerging Internet Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms are expected to enable
wide spread use of real time services such as VoIP and videoconferencing.
However, the service level agreement with a mobile Internet user is hard to
satisfy, since there may not be enough resources available in some parts of the
network the mobile user is moving into. The emerging Internet QoS architectures,
differentiated services and integrated services, do not consider user mobility.
Thus, there must be mechanisms available to identify traffic flows with
different QoS parameters, and to make it possible to charge the users based on
requested quality. Our research in QoS provisioning in wireless networks focuses
on the following issues: channel dependent packet scheduling in packet cellular
networks, QoS aware MAC layer protocol in wireless LAN and end-to-end traffic
management issues in mobile IP networks.
Next generation mobile networks need to support multi-class services with
asymmetric bandwidth allocation between uplink and downlink to satisfy the
asymmetric traffic load brought by some data services. In such networks, how to
decrease the average system cost is a key issue for the design of call admission
control (CAC) policy. In this project, we study the optimal admission policy for
minimizing a liner cost function to obtain the minimum average system cost. By
modeling the admission control problem into a Markov Decision Process (MDP)
model and analyzing the corresponding value function, we obtain some
monotonicity properties of the optimal policy. Due to the prohibitively high
complexity for computing the thresholds in a large system state space, we
propose a heuristic policy called Call-Rate-based Dynamic Threshold (CRDT)
policy to approximate the theoretical optimal policy based on the insights of
the optimal policy properties we obtain from the modeling and the analytical
study. The numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness and good performance
of the proposed scheme.
Another interesting topic is algorithmic & combinatorial optimization issues in
resource management & QoS provisioning in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Nodes
in an ad-hoc network runs on a local energy source which has a limited energy
life span. Thus, energy conservation is a critical issue in ad hoc wireless
networks. The support for connections with Quality of Service (QoS) requirements
is also another area that needs to be addressed in ad hoc network. The provision
of QoS relies on resource reservation and the goal of QoS routing is twofold,
namely (i) selecting network paths that have sufficient resources that meet the
QoS requirements for all admitted connections and (ii) achieving global
efficiency in resource reservation. The problem of resource reservation and the
problem of routing under resource constraints in an ad hoc network are difficult
because the network topology may change constantly, and the available state
information for routing is inherently imprecise. Existing solution strategies
for wireline networks cannot be directly applied to ad hoc network as they rely
on the availability of precise state information. We aim to investigate resource
management and QoS provisioning issues in MANETs and to design, analyse and
implement efficient solution strategies for these problems.
In MANETs, wireless routes are subject to frequent breakage due to node
mobility. This results in considerably severe performance degradation during the
route repair/reconstruction periods, or termination of communication (dropped
calls) if no replacement routes can be found. This may not be desirable for
certain applications with strict QoS requirements. To address this issue, we are
conducting a project “Routing Protocol Design with Link Expiry Prediction for
Smooth Route Switching”. This project aims to establish efficient algorithms to
predict impending link expiry/breakages utilizing pertinent system and/or
channel information, so as to develop novel predictive routing protocols to
facilitate smoother route switching and lower drop call rates.
Staff
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Assoc/Prof. Low Chor Ping
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Assoc/Prof.
David Siew Chee Kheong
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Assoc/Prof. Ang Yew Hock
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Assoc/Prof. Feng Gang
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Asst/Prof. Ng Jim Mee
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Asst/Prof. Qin Yang
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Asst/Prof Tang Junhua
Research Students
Software Engineering and Applications Research Group
Overview
We focus on software engineering, collaborative virtual environments and
software agents. In software engineering, we focus on four main areas: (1)
methods and tools for systematic transformation of functional models into
Object-Oriented and Component-Based design and implementation; (2)
feature-oriented automated verification and test case generations for software
systems; (3) sizing software from conceptual models; (4) prediction of errors
and reliability of software systems. In software engineering applications, we
focus on collaborative virtual environments, software agents and e-learning.
Staff
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Assoc/Prof. Tan Hee Beng Kuan
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Assoc/Prof. Yang Zhonghua
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Assoc/Prof. Lin Qingping
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Asst/Prof. Quah Tong Seng
Research Students (
Software Engineering )
Research Students ( Agent )
Computational
Intelligence Group
Overview
Technological developments in the strategic areas like life science, biomedical
engineering, information engineering and etc are dominated by the way
information and knowledge is extracted and learned. Various machine-learning
technologies have been extensively used in many such applications. However, the
complexity and real-time learning are two challenging problems in the
applications of these machine-learning technologies.
Fundamentally different from traditional learning theory, a new real-time
machine learning theory has recently been proposed by us. Based on this
significant contribution in the fundamental machine learning theory, "human
brain" in computing environment which can deal with real-time learning and
prediction could be implemented (in both hardware and software) in the near
future. Our research results are very vital. It would greatly impact many
related R&D areas (bioinformatics, virus detection, disease diagnosis, virus
genome sequence analysis, grid/parallel implementation of knowledge system,
handwritten character recognition, face recognition, military surveillance
system, satellite image processing, robot control system, tracking and
navigation systems, meteorology, and many others.) and eventually could change
people's life style. Our result implies the possibility of the advent of "truly"
intelligent systems for large-scale applications and/or time-critical
applications. This result also opens the possibility of an important new
research direction to investigate the real-time online learning machine. Its
social and economic benefits would be very high. The possible areas under this
umbrella could be but not limited to:
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Further
investigation on real-time learning/computational intelligence theory
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Embedded
real-time learning system
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Real-time reasoning system
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Real-time human-computer interface
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Real-time smart weapons
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Real-time robot control system
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Real-time tracking and navigation system
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Real-time fault and disease diagnosis system
Staff
Asst/Prof Huang Guangbin
Research Students
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