School of Computing and Technology Research

Centre for Networks and Distributed Systems


The Centre for Networks and Distributed Systems was established in November 2010 and grew out of the Networks Research Group founded in October 2008 to recognise the growing research focus in this area.

The group consists of Professor Peter Komisarczuk, Dr John Moore, Dr Wei Jie and Dr Nasser Matoorian, with research assistant Jiva Bagale and a number of PhD students.

The group has a remit to focus on applied research in areas such as:
  • network protocols and architecture
  • internet / network security
  • pervasive computing
  • cognitive radio and the modelling of network protocols
  • socio-dynamics
  • educational tools in the context of networks.
One of the aims of the group is to contribute to open source projects as well as to create new projects to release back to the community.

Our work also includes funded projects and knowledge transfer with industry.

Our current research has included contribution to or development of:
  • Packedobjects: An efficient data encoding tool especially useful for communications in pervasive and embedded systems
  • Contributing to the development and research of forensics and drive-by-downloads through Capture-HPC and the Honeynet Project 
  • Contributions to the development of Grid computing middleware 
  • Using reinforcement learning as a basis to improve the performance of cognitive radio systems
  • Thumbtribes: for the study of random social encounters
  • Bluedog: Tracking the movements of students using Bluetooth
  • Fakesat:  a low cost indoor GPS alternative for indoor positioning and mobile service triggering
  • Shazbot: Internet Relay Chat (IRC) robot to teach the principles of programming.
The work of the Networks Research Group underpins the development of Masters courses in the field and enables the development of research-led teaching at graduate and postgraduate level.