As part of a broader organisational restructure, data networking research at Swinburne University of Technology has moved from the Centre for Advanced Internet Architecture (CAIA) to the Internet For Things (I4T) Research Lab.

Although CAIA no longer exists, this website reflects CAIA's activities and outputs between March 2002 and February 2017, and is being maintained as a service to the broader data networking research community.

Broadband IP access architecture

Twenty first century Australia's entrepreneurial future depends on widespread deployment of reliable broadband network access throughout our population. Arguably this is as important to the nation's growth as bringing paved roads and highways was to nineteenth and twentieth century Australia.

Unfortunately, broadband internet offerings today are a mixed-bag. Visionaries hope for open and transparent IP communication, enabling anyone to build value-added Internet services over their broadband links. Internet service providers struggle to find business models for broadband service that don't require apriori and artificial constraints on the sorts of IP network traffic the end customer is allowed to exchange.

We are interested in work that:

• Improves the methods and models for mapping measurable network characteristics (such as bandwidth availability, reliability of service, etc) to consumer experiences and expectations.

• Develops innovative algorithms for providing service differentiation over broadband links (for example, protecting interactive application traffic from bursts of web surfing and email traffic in and out of a home or network segment)

• Creates algorithms and methods to automate consumer network access management, especially for value-added services such as real-time, interactive games.

• Evaluates and improves transport architectures and protocols for IP-based, high-speed distributed storage systems (such as would be required by geographically distributed data analysis companies)

• Explores and critiques "walled garden" ISP access architectures (where explicit firewalls and filtering, transparent proxies, limited IP address allocations, etc, are used to inhibit or mediate a consumer's access to rest of the Internet). How are end-users limited by such architectures? How can ISPs re-architect to meet their business goals without walled-gardens.

• Develops new solutions to broadband access beyond current cable modem and ADSL services (for example, integrated media and IPv6 access over optical fiber or semi-fixed wireless technologies)

• Challenges the entire "slow edge-fast core" network model that pervades the current Internet. For example, what if broadband IP access was a local utility service, with highest bandwidths at the street and town level and neighborhood servers providing email forwarding and web caching throughout urban and suburban locations?