Distributed Computing and Systems

Description:
Distributed System is a generic term to indicate any system that is composed by a collection of communicating computational devices, and distributed computing refers to computability and complexity  issues in such environments. Our team is quite diverse and complementary, and it  covers a wide spectrum of aspects of  "Distributed Computing and Systems" ranging from theory  to applications and including algorithm design, simulation, networks, architectures and management. Our research focuses on a variety of distributed environments (wired, wireless, ad hoc, mobile, peer-to-peer, self-organized). In all these environments we are interested in various issues, among them:  design, efficiency, fault tolerance, quality of service,  communication software reliability, safety and security.

Applications:
Applications of our research  include peer-to-peer systems, distributed multimedia systems, wireless and ad hoc networks, sensor networks, communication systems (IP-telephony, teleconferencing), e-commerce, distributed databases, large-scale distributed and mobile systems, mobile software agent technology,   and network manage.

PROFESSORS:

• Bochmann (group) 
  peer-to-peer systems, quality of service management, distributed multimedia systems
• Bolić (group) 
  multiprocessor systems on chip, computer architectures for systems on chip
• Boukerche (group)  
  distributed algorithms, distributed and mobile computing, wireless ad hoc, sensor and mesh systems, distributed and mobile systems, distributed and mobile database systems, mobile peer-to-peer systems
• Flocchini, Paola
  distributed algorithms, distributed computing, algorithms for mobile entities
• Groza, Voicu
  real-time embedded systems, smart sensors networks, distributed intelligent instrumentation
• Ionescu (group)
  network computing and control, design of distributed system software, pervasive and social computing, unified distributed communication systems, autonomic computing
• Jourdan, Guy-Vincent
  distributed systems modeling, distributed systems testing, peer-to-peer systems
• Karmouch (group)
  multimedia application and services, mobile computing, ambient networks, autonomic networks
• Miri (group)
  privacy-preserving datamining, secure multi-party computations, ad hoc and sensor networks
• Nayak, Amiya
  fault tolerance, distributed systems, ad hoc and sensor networks
• Stojmenovic, Ivan
  distributed ad hoc, sensor, cellular wireless networks, applied algorithms
• Ural, Hasan
  distributed system testing and verification, formal methods for software specification and design

Some recent projects:

• Quality of service of Web Services and load sharing in peer-to-peer systems [Bochmann; funded by NSERC; earlier work was funded by IBM, NSERC, CITO, ORNEC and Nortel Networks]
• Fault tolerance of wireless sensor networks for emergency response and preparedness [Boukerche; funded by NSERC Strategic]
• Algorithms and protocols for large-scale distributed systems [Boukerche; funded by NSERC]
• Distributed simulation and wireless multimedia systems [Boukerche; funded by Canada Research Chair]
• Design of distributed interactive simulation systems [Boukerche; funded by Early Research Excellence Award]
• Network decontamination and other safety problems by mobile agents [Flocchini; funded by NSERC and University Research Chair]
• Distributed coordination of autonomous robots [Flocchini; funded by NSERC]
• Seamless mobility management [Karmouch; funded by NSERC and Ericsson]
• Ambient Networks [Karmouch; funded by Europe, NSERC]
• MESHNET [Karmouch; funded by Europe, NSERC]
• Reliable, secure distributed information systems [Miri; funded by NSERC]
• Scalable, secure and localizes data communication and topology control protocols for wireless ad hoc networks [Najak, Stojmenovic; funded by NSERC CRD]
• Energy-conserving coordination and data communication in wireless sensor actuator networks [Najak, Stojmenovic; funded by NSERC Strategic]
• Novel schemes for detecting attack packets during DDoS attacks [Najak; funded by ORNEC]
• Secure content routing for B2B applications [Ionescu; funded by ORNEC, NSERC, OCE]
• A pattern-based approach to autonomic computing [Ionescu; funded by IBM, NSERC, OCE]
• Test suite reduction for distributed system regression testing [Ural; funded by NSERC]
• Distributed database application testing [Ural; funded by NSERC]
• Design recovery from observations of concurrent systems [Ural; funded by NSERC]
• Reconfigurable distributed virtual instrumentation [Groza; funded by NSERC]