Research interests

· Peer-to-Peer and Decentralized Systems

· Multimedia Content Networking

· Next Generation Middleware

· Autonomic and Adaptive Systems

 

Current Research Work

Juno is a content-centric reflective middleware. It has been identified that most modern applications are highly content-centric. This means that applications often have a need for some form of content delivery but rarely have a vested interest in how this occurs or where the content is obtained from. Instead, the application simply requires the verified content within certain requirements bounds. Currently, however, it is necessary for developers to select statically at design time a content delivery scheme and integrate it into the application. This is undesirable as runtime variations often make this process suboptimal. Juno addresses these concerns by abstracting content delivery away from the application. Instead, applications can simply interact with the middleware using a request/reply paradigm. This allows Juno to dynamically resolve requests and select the optimal means by which the content can be obtained. This is achieved through dynamic and reflective software reconfiguration both locally and between multiple cooperating Juno instances. It has been found that this approach allows significant performance benefits to be gained by taking into account both environmental constraints and application requirements . Alongside this, non-functional properties have also been improved in the field such as extensibility and reusability.

 

Collaborative Work

I am currently working with a number of European partners. So far this work has focused on peer-to-peer incentive management with the Technische Universitat Darmstadt and Universite Pierre et Marie Curie. Alongside this, Juno has been developed in cooperation with the University of Oslo. Currently, work on a hybrid multimedia caching architecture is also being performed  with the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II. Further, I am also closely involved with the Content Networking Benchmarking Workgroup alongside a number of CONTENT partners.

Gareth Tyson