Helping the Web to spin a little faster

Fundamental research into Internet performance modelling and evaluation is the new Millennium research theme of the Computer Systems Modelling (CSM) research group in the Department of Computing, led by Professor Demetres Kouvatsos. Recent related research work of the group on high-speed networks has been carried out with EPSRC support grants.

The enormous growth in the Internet presents today a major challenge and means that performance modelling and quantitative analysis are crucial for the provision of efficient and reliable information access and services over the Internet at a reasonable cost.

World Wide Web (www) servers are the primary point-of-presence for information dissemination and retrieval, and have become ubiquitous front-ends for traditional content such as text, video, and audio, as well as remote execution services such as electronic commerce.

However, the advent of faster workstations, client-server distributed computing, and bandwidth-demanding applications have resulted in an Internet traffic explosion which at present is well beyond the switching capacity of the Internet Protocol (IP) routers. As a consequence, network managers and users are facing increasing congestion control problems and poor Quality-of-Service (QoS) for multimedia applications. For example, network response times are highly variable, network failure rates are increasing, and delay-sensitive applications cannot be properly supported. So the work that Professor Kouvatsos and his team are doing will aid the provision of efficient and reliable information access and services over the Internet.

Central to the investigations of the CSM group is the establishment of simple and practical means, in the form of novel analytic methodologies and cost-effective algorithms, for Internet traffic characterisation and engineering as well as performance and reliability modelling, evaluation and prediction. This will lead into the design and development, with close industrial collaboration, of new IP switching protocols which can be used to enhance Internet performance by combining the flexibility of IP software with the high transmission speed and QoS guarantees of modern networking infrastructures.

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University - Public Relations - Annual Reports - 2000 Contents - Research

University of Bradford, Bradford, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom

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