The Distributed Systems Group at UTS has been working on the efficient implementation of communication protocols and architectures for the past 3 years. This has been supported by a number of research grants and through industrial research contracts - mainly from the Australian and Overseas Telecommunications Corporation (AOTC).
As a result of this and related work at UTS, in 1992 the group was awarded an infrastructure grant from Digital Equipment Corporation under its External Research Programme for the establishment of a Distributed Multi-media Laboratory. This grant has enabled the installation of a high speed FDDI network, connecting DS5000 workstations with interfaces for audio and video. This Laboratory has now been complemented by the approval of an Infrastructure grant through the Australian Research Council of the Australian Government.
The group has undertaken research into high speed protocol implementation, multiple stream synchronization, and operating system resource allocation for continuous media. Since 1992 work has also focussed on the decomposition of protocol functions for adaptivity, especially in the context of digital video streams with varying quality of service needs.
The group at UTS is now also part of the Distributed Systems Technology Centre (DSTC), which is funded to a total of $A12million over 7 years by the Federal Government as part of its Cooperative Research Centres (CRC) program. The DSTC is a cooperative venture between a number of Australian universities, including UTS and the University of Queensland, and a number of companies, including Digital and AOTC. The UTS group is responsible for the Network Management and Performance research program of the DSTC. A particular aspect of this work is the dynamic management of performance of high speed networks, such as multi-media networks.
As a result of the above work the group has gained experience and knowledge that is especially suited to research into dynamically configurable protocol architectures within a ALF/ILP environment. The infrastructure established at UTS will also provide an ideal vehicle for experimental work.