The School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow is seeking
to recruit new faculty, with Parallel, Distributed or Networked Systems
being a priority area. These are permanent positions, at Lecturer or
Senior Lecturer level (equivalent to US tenure track Assistant/Associate
Professor). Please contact me if interested,
or for more information. See
the University website for full details and how to apply. Closing date
for applications is 3 February 2017.
The Carnegie Trust funds PhD scholarships across the Universities
within Scotland. The University of Glasgow can nominate seven students
for these scholarships. These are highly competitive awards, available
to undergraduates at Scottish Universities who are in line for a very
good first class degree (A1/A2 average). If you're interested in
applying for one of these scholarships, working in the area of network
transport protocols or congestion control for the future Internet, then
please contact me by early January 2017.
We're seeking a postdoctoral research associate to work on the EPSRC-funded
FRμIT project at the University
of Glasgow. The position involves building a massively distributed
federated compute fabric using commodity low-power infrastructure,
such as Raspberry Pi nodes.
The introduction of ubiquitous low-cost, low-power compute devices,
e.g., in the Internet of Things (IoT) is fundamentally changing the
computational landscape. Although we already see the benefits provided
by special purpose IoT devices, the true capability is only realised
when we can re-purpose large numbers of distributed devices as part of
a much larger federated service. This is captured in the FRUIT project
hypothesis: "Massive aggregation of low-cost, low-power, commodity
infrastructure can form an efficient and effective compute fabric for
key distributed applications."
We've submitted an initial draft on
Post Sockets, An Abstract Programming Interface for the Transport Layer
to the IETF. This draft proposes an outline new API for the transport
layer that could form an eventual replacement for the Berkeley Sockets
API. It aims to support the features of modern transport- and
path-layer protocols, including long-lived security associations and
multipath operation.
A host using DHCP with IPv6 is identified by a DHCP unique identifier
(DUID). It's not well documented how to find this identifier on a Mac.
Stephen McQuistin presented our paper on
Implementing
Real-Time Transport Services over an Ossified Network at the ACM, IRTF,
and ISOC Applied Networking Research Workshop in Berlin, on 16 July 2016
(slides).
This paper considers the transport services needed by real-time applications,
based on a top-down analysis of their requirements, and their implementation
on ossified networks such as the Internet, and based on this proposes
an abstract transport API. A cut-down version of this talk was also
given in the TAPS working group at IETF 96
(slides).
How should the
RTP circuit breaker react to persistent excessive congestion
signalled via ECN? Indeed, should the circuit breaker
react to such a congestion signal?
Stephen McQuistin presented our paper
TCP Goes
to Hollywood at the ACM NOSSDAV workshop in Klagenfurt am
Wörthersee, Austria, on 13 May 2016
(slides).
This paper introduces TCP Hollywood, a new TCP variant that aims
to reduce transport-induced latency for multimedia applications.
It gives an overview of the protocol, and outlines the conditions
where it offers benefit over standard TCP.
Simon Jouet presented his work on
OTCP: SDN-Managed Congestion Control for Data Centre Networks at
the IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium workshop in
Istanbul, Turkey, in April 2016. OTCP is an OpenFlow-based approach
to tuning TCP congestion control parameters to better match network
characteristics that can improve flow completion times in data centre
networks.
I attended the UK Network Operators' Forum (UKNOF) #34, held in
Manchester on 21 April 2016. As part of this event, Stuart Grace
from BBC R&D gave a presentation on
IP Networks in the TV Studio, discussing how they use RTP for
media transport, including use of the
RFC 4175 uncompressed video format we developed in UltraGrid.
The
16th Scottish Networking Event was a 48-hour, 2-night, retreat.
It was held at
Firbush Point, Killin, Perthshire from 13-15 April 2016. The focus
of the meeting was on “pitching for resources”, in
particular developing and framing research ideas in the context of the
challenges in developing rural broadband infrastructure.