Information regarding Postgraduate Research

This page contains all the relevant information for students who wish to pursuit research in Telecommunications at the Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies, Swinburne University of Technology.

How to apply for Postgraduate Research?

Students who wish to join our research centre (Centre for Advance Internet Architecture - CAIA) as a postgraduate student (Master by research or Doctor of Philosophy - PhD) please provide the following information when you first contact me (Dr Philip Branch, CAIA's Research Higher Degrees coordinator) or any prospective supervisor in our Telecommunications group.

1. Your contact details (email, postal address, and phone number if any).
   

2. A copy of your academic records (transcript) in English detailing:
   
   

   1. all subjects you studied, the time and duration of the subject.
      

   2. content of the subject if any (provide the link to the course taught by your university would be sufficient).
      

   3. marks you have obtained from those subjects (you should also provide the marking scheme for the obtained marks, i.e. what is the maximum mark and what is the pass mark for that subject).
      

   4. for international students you should also provide English test results to demonstrate English language proficiency and communication skills such as results of the IELTS (International English Language Testing System) test.
      
      

3. Source of funding for your studies (e.g. self funding, or scholarship if you intend to apply for scholarships - see below for How to apply for a scholarship?). Note that at this stage we are unable to accept part time PhD students.
   

4. A short (2 pages maximum) research proposal about your research interest/goals, and how you are going to achieve them. You may want to have a look at research areas that are currently on-going in CAIA and explain in your proposal how your research interest can fit in.
   Note that you should get the approval for the research proposal from a coordinating supervisor (nominated by you) prior to the scholarship application.
   

5. Your resume (CV) detailing any experience in industry you may have, your availability (when will you be able to start) and your status (i.e. local/ resident/ overseas student).
   
   

How to apply for a scholarship?

There are several scholarships available for postgraduate students, each has different requirements and deadline. This section provides some information and links for available scholarships, and how to apply.

1. Australian Postgraduate Awards (APAs) are available to Australian citizens or Permanent Residents (PR).
   

2. Other scholarships at Swinburne University of Technology (e.g. Swinburne University Postgraduate Research Award - SUPRA, International Postgraduate Research Scholarship - IPRS) can be found here. Check out also here for more information about scholarships.
   
   

Other information:

Information about the requirements of research study at Swinburne University and what you can expect from your supervisor can be found here.

Prospective Supervisors:

                   Lachlan Andrew
                   Grenville Armitage
                   Philip Branch
                   Jason But
                   Hai Vu
 

Project title: Power management of computing clusters

Supervisor: Lachlan Andrew (CAIA) and Jarrod Hurley (CAS)

Description:

A large data centre consumes as much electricity as an entire city. These data centres consist of hundreds or thousands of individual computers serving a time-varying workload, and it is important to turn off as many servers as possible, with minimal degradation in performance. This project will both develop and study provably-good algorithms for such power management, and also develop state-of-the-art heuristics to minimise the power consumption of Swinburne's super computing cluster, the "Green Machine".

Project title: Efficient Internet Congestion Control

Supervisor: Lachlan Andrew (CAIA)

Description:

Common experiences of excessive web-browsing delay and unacceptable quality of streaming applications demonstrate a clear need to improve the quality of service (QoS) for Internet services. Due to traffic burstiness (e.g., flash-crowds), pure over-provisioning is not efficient. Instead, traffic control mechanisms are also necessary. This project will develop new mechanisms and study existing ones, using sound theory (control and queuing theory) and empirical validation. It will consider interactions between end-users and routers that will provide cost-effective, energy efficient and scalable QoS solutions to enable the Internet to continue its tremendous growth.

Project title: Modelling and Measuring the Internet

Supervisor: Lachlan Andrew (CAIA)

Description:

The Internet is the most complex device humans have built. Even the designers and operators do not know its complete structure, or understand the full implications of minor changes. Such simple things as which packets get dropped when a router buffer overflows can have a significant impact on the average data rates achieved by TCP flows, and the speed of convergence to those rates. This project will develop accurate models of such effects, based both on bottom-up models of network dynamics and on measurement in real test-bed networks.