Dublin City University

Dublin City University

DCU will offer 4 studentships to well qualified applicants.  In the table below you will find a list of projects together with the proposed supervisors of that work.  Click on the project to link to further details. If you are interested in a particular topic and would like to discuss it further, please contact the supervisor directly.

The Studentships on offer are as follows:

Studentship Topics Supervisor
Efficient modelling and design of wideband EM wave absorbers Conor Brennan and Marissa Condon
Efficient FPGA hardware implementation for pairing Mike Scott and Xiaojun Wang
Optical switching system configuration using NETFPGA Martin Collier and Pascal Landais
Rich media services in heterogeneous networks Gabriel Muntean andJennifer McManis

Note: Applications are only accepted from students who have been awarded a first or upper second-class honours degree from a reputable institution.

The DCU involvement in the TGI initiative involves researchers from The Rince Instituteand The Claude Shannon institute .

Funded under PRTLI Cycle 1 in 1999, The Rince Institute is a national centre for excellence in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and one of the major centres for telecommunications research in Ireland. It comprises three main research centres which further consist of independent research groups. The centres are

The Network Innovations Centre

The High Speed Devices and Systems Centre

The Centre for Image Processing and Analysis

The centres are housed in modern purpose-built facilities and are equipped with state of the art testing and measurement facilities for photonic systems, wired network testbeds, extensive cross-development facilities, modelling and simulation software and modern computing resources. Our extensive network of collaborations involves academic partners such as University of Auckland, University of Southampton, Delft University, University of Warwick, Brunel University, Tsinghua University Beijing, Queen Mary University London as well as industrial partners such as Intune Networks, Eblana Photonics, Eircom, Industria, Vilicom and Alcatel-Lucent.

Funded under the Science Foundation Ireland Mathematics Initiative, the Claude Shannon Institute’s mission is to support research in broad areas of the Mathematics of Communications. It involves academics from third level institutions right across the country and Dublin City University’s Prof. Mike Scott leads the research on elliptic/hyper-elliptic curve cryptography.

Project Information

 

Efficient modelling and design of wideband EM wave absorbers

All material objects interact with electromagnetic (EM) fields and waves, producing reflected and diffracted waves that can interfere harmfully with telecommunication sytems. One example, of increasing relevance, is the effect that wind-farms have on wireless signals in their vicinity. The turbines can adversely affect analogue and digital television reception and impede the performance of other systems such as radar. To fully understand the interference effects, and to devise strategies to counteract them, engineers first need to be able to mathematically model the interaction of the objects with EM waves. While possible, this becomes increasingly challenging in terms of computational resources required, especially for large structures. This project will build on existing work carried out in DCU in this area, namely in the development of efficient computational tools for solving wideband electromagnetic wave scattering problems. The integral equation / method of moments formulation will be used in conjunction with Well-Conditioned Asymptotic Waveform Extraction (WC-AWE) and the Fast Multipole Method in order to accelerate the computations by several orders of magnitude. The resultant codes will be parallelised and run on the Irish Centre for High End Computing facilities. The codes will then be used to design thin multilayered absorbing coatings that have the potential to significantly reduce the strength of fields scattered from the treated structure. For more information about this project please contact Conor Brennan or Marissa Condon .

Efficient FPGA hardware implementation for pairing

Pairing-based cryptography uses new powerful cryptographic primitives based on the mathematics of pairings over special elliptic curves. Examples include identity-based encryption and attribute-based encryption. These map well onto real-world security concerns, and offer elegant solutions. Unfortunately pairings are relatively slow to calculate in software (~1ms on a standard PC), so there is a need for small cheap hardware implementations and accelerators. Speed, memory requirements and energy consumption will be taken into consideration in the hardware implementation. For more information about this project please contact Mike Scott or Xiaojun Wang .

Optical switching system configuration using NETFPGA

The project involves the generation of modulating data for an optical communications channel using the NETFPGA-10G (a programmable network card with four 10GigaE interfaces). The NETFPGA will also generate control signals that will selectively perform wavelength conversion on the modulated signal, thereby allowing it to be gated by an optical filter. A second NETFPGA-10G board will capture the modulated data and confirm the successful transmission or suppression of the optical signal. For more information about this project please contact Martin Collier or Pascal Landais .

Rich media services in heterogeneous networks

A major issue in rich media communications in heterogeneous wireless network environment is the mapping between the requirements of the services to be provided and the features offered by the network nodes. In this mapping an important contribution has network delivery‐related characteristics, which vary greatly depending on the technology employed, load – both in terms of traffic and in terms of number of users and policy. In such a context, it seems natural to introduce a new framework for supporting this services‐node features mapping. The preliminary framework has three layers:

1) Services Layer – includes major service classes (e.g. Control, Interactive, Realtime Transport and Reliable Transport); each class has requirements described in terms of reliability, delay sensitivity, loss sensitivity, capacity of transport, etc.

2) Network Layer – includes available networks described both via their supporting technologies (e.g. WiFi, LTE, WiMAx, etc.), and their QoS characteristics such as: average bandwidth, range, loss, delay, etc.

3) Features Layer – includes the communicating nodes and their associated features described in terms of video acquiring capabilities, audio capturing device features, processing capabilities, communications support, etc.

The goal of this project is two‐fold: it will fully formulate the three‐layer framework which enables service‐node feature mapping and it will propose a solution for supporting efficiently differentiated rich media service delivery in a heterogeneous wireless environment based on this framework. Download more details of this project here , or please contact Gabriel Muntean or Jennifer McManis .

 

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