Centre for Research in Distributed Technologies

CREDIT

Centre for Research in Distributed Technologies

The Centre has some 10 academic staff, 1 postdoctoral fellow and 5 PhD students. Research is focused on three areas: Secure Services, Communications and Networks and Distributed Processing. Collaborations exist with institutes both within the UK, such as Cambridge University, UCL and Imperial College London, and around the world, in countries including Poland, Spain, India and Canada.

The Secure Services Group has research interests in the areas of secure web services, ubiquitous systems, trust and privacy, and their work is partly funded by EPSRC. Particular strengths of the group include novel methods for authentication including visual password systems.

Software is being developed that allows user authentication using an image password scheme. Such schemes overcome many of the problems that arise when using traditional text-based passwords. Research is also ongoing in trust signs and semiotics.

The Communications and Network Group has particular strengths in routing and optimisation strategies and is gaining regular EPSRC funding.

A major project concerns optimisation issues for wireless local area networks (WLAN) and 3rd Generation (3G) mobile communications networks. The methods and techniques used are modelling, optimisation, system identification and parallel computing.

The key idea is to look for the best way to optimise the numbers and locations of base stations, in order to achieve minimum cost while satisfying constraints in coverage, capacity and quality of service.

Work is also being conducted in optimising networks for small to medium enterprises (SMEs) and routing through ad-hoc networks.

The Distributed Processing Group has interests in solving complex problems through parallel computing strategies. The group has received £30,000 funding for a cluster that will be in place from September 2004.

The cluster will have 30 nodes and will be used to solve problems from electrical engineering to medical applications. The group has collaborations across Europe, most notably with Poland.

In recent years, CREDIT has had notable success in collaborating with local industry and currently has several EPSRC studentships for projects which work closely with SMEs.