Research Areas

Devices are how our customers experience our network. We are investigating future devices and their complexity, how they will co-operate together and how they will support and bring to life (or bypass) the services available on BT's 21st Century Network.

We are part of a global interdisciplinary team that is foremost in helping to shape the future of the Internet. In particular we are researching re-feedback (potentially the first architectural change to the Internet for 10 - 20 years) and architectures that are resistant to denial of service (DoS). We have helped create organisations such as the Communications Research Network (CRN) to assess problems in the industry and push forward solutions.

We are researching and developing novel QoS^? techniques primarily based on congestion measurements that are both flexible and economic. At longer timescales QoS^? becomes Resilience and here we are investigating IP control plane architectures as well as new inter domain routing facilities.

Networks are comprised of many interacting and distributed control processes for resource allocation and management. Network design and architecture are both concerned with how such processes are organised. We are using optimisation theory to study this problem, and are developing specification and programming language techniques in support of this approach.

Who will you trust in the future? How will privacy be maintained in a pervasive computing world? These are the fundamental questions being tackled by looking at emerging technologies like RFID and the increasing use of sensors in the Health and Transport sectors.

BT's future networking vision is centered around our 21st Century Network (21CN). But technology does not stand still, what happens next with 21CN? We are investigating what the 5, 10 or even 15 year vision architecture for BT's communications systems should be in order to fit with global economic, technical, social and political trends.