Research group on Distributed Systems

Distributed Systems Research Group

EECS , University of Ottawa

Table of content:

General description of research activities
People
Publications
Recent research projects
Tools
Location
Other pointers

General description of research activities

Current research areas:

Software engineering for distributed applications - Web Services, e-commerce, workflow management: formal techniques and methods for system requirement specification and the derivation of distributed system designs from global specifications
Peer-to-peer systems - aiming at reliability and performance: providing predicable performance and reliability to various applications (e.g. database access, video distribution, etc.) by using peer-to-peer systems and techniques developed for Grid applications
Crawling of Rich Internet Applications

Currently less active research areas:

Optical networks - exploring future network architectures with time-sharing of wavelengths: agile all-photonic networks, time-sharing of wavelength bandwidth, network control and routing protocols
Quality of service management for distributed multimedia applications: adaptive applications, user and device mobility, security aspects, quality of service mangement and adaptation (see research description from 2002)
Development of test cases for communication protocols and software systems: black-box testing, deriving test cases from the specification of the tested component, test development based on state-transition models, fault coverage issues, diagnostic testing (mainly during the 1990ies)
Formal description techniques for communication protocols and other applications: Development and standardization of modeling languages for communication protocols and services (Estelle language and SDL - precursors of UML State diagrams), development of tools for generation of implementation code and test cases from system specifications (mainly during the 1980ies and 1990ies)

People

Principal investigator: Gregor v. Bochmann
Post-doctoral researchers

Yiming Zhang (part time)

PhD students

Toqeer Israr
Seyed M. Mirtaheri - room 4009F
Khaled Ben Hafaiedh - room 4009E Tel 6243

MSc students

Aliaa Alghamdi
Di Zou
Xinghao Xu

Publications

Recent Publications: Here you can find a list of our recent publications since 2000, classified by general areas.
Selected Publications : This page describes the more important publications before 2000, also classified by areas.
Public Documents: Most of the above, certain Master and PhD theses, and certain Powerpoint presentations are available here in alphabetical order.
ACM publications: You can down-load these publications from this web site.
List of all publications and reports with copies and pointers

Recent research projects

Requirements engineering and design methods for distributed applications: NSERC Discovery grant (ongoing)
Modeling Rich Internet Applications for security and distributed crawling: NSERC CRD projects with IBM (ongoing). INVISABLE - Hypercube Hypercube2 Hypercube3 Hypercube4
Requirements-Driven Development of Distributed Applications funded by an NSERC strategic grant (2002 - 2005).
Agile All-Photonic Networks (AAPN): Our first project on optical networks, "Optical networks and IP traffic" (early 2000), was funded by NCIT and performed in collaboration with several other professors. From 2002 to 2007, our group was involved in the AAPN project, an NSERC research network (here are some copied pages)
User-Controlled Lightpath Provisioning (UCLP): a project was performed in collaboration with CRC during 2003-2007 (partially funded by Canarie).
QoS and Distributed Systems Management: This project was part of the Major Project on Enabling Technologies for Electronic Commerce (1998-2003) of the Canadian Institute for Telecommunication Research (CITR), a Canadian "network of centers of excellence" (NCE). Part of this work was also funded by CITO.

Tools

Location

The research of this group is performed in the SITE building (see map and parking) in the following research laboratories, which are shared by the research groups of several professors:

SITE building- room 4009: this is part of the Advanced Internet Applications and Systems (AIAS) Laboratory

Other useful pointers

How to do good research : some reflections on this topic prepared during a visit in China.
How to write a good paper : Hints and opinions about writing networking papers by Henning Schulzrinne
Internal documents of the DSRG
Software tools sometimes used: Telelogic Tau for UML and SDL, Design/CPN

Last update: Sept. 2012

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