UMOBILE Documentation

University College London (UCL) is one of the premier universities in the UK and has been consistently ranked in the top 20 universities in the world. In the area of communications research, the department’s activities span areas across all the layers of the communication protocol stack, ranging from radio, optical coding and transmission through routing, resource control and traffic engineering up to content-centric and peer-to-peer networking, multimedia applications and network/service management.

UCL’s relevant expertise has been obtained through its participation in a number of research projects in the areas of QoS, network/service management, content-centric networking content distribution, virtualization and future Internet, in which it has had a leading role. UCL’s relevance expertise is also testified through numerous prestigious publications and the high standing in the networking research community of the relevant academics who will be involved in the project. Examples of recent related projects are TEQUILA, MESCAL, CONTEXT, AMBIENT, MCDN, AGAVE, EMANICS, AUTOI, ENVISION and COMET. COMET has been one of the most successful projects in the area of content-networking and ICN. Currently, UCL is participating in the EU FP7/NICT GreenICN project, which focuses on ICN solutions to disaster management. Furthermore, UCL is running a UK-funded EPSRC project on “Active Content Management at Internet Scale” (COMIT), which focuses on a smooth migration path towards the shift to Information-Centric Networking. The team at UCL has been actively involved in the ICN-related IRTF group, called ICNRG, where members of the group contributed to the initial outputs of the group (see ICNRG ICN Research Challenges document).

Role in UMOBILE project

UCL will bring into the project its expertise in content resolution and delivery in ICN environments, naming systems and architectures and optimal server placement for content distribution to remote regions. More in particular, UCL will work on naming, content resolution and replication/caching of content close to the users in an environment, where direct access to the origin server is not possible. This will be achieved through smart content naming that allows for sophisticated and efficient replication based on content names. Issues of energy efficiency and security will be taken into account from the onset, in contrast to past approaches that consider these issues as an aftermath. UCL will also participate in the design of energy efficient algorithms for disastertolerant scenarios, where battery- limited mobile devices are the main carrier of content.