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.

Current Programs

Here are a selection of programs running (or recently completed) at CAIA, or external projects with which CAIA is involved.

• This project, supported by a Cisco University Research Program (URP) grant,  aims to develop relatively simple, implementable mechanisms to significantly reduce the update-processing load of BGP speakers in the default-free zone of the Internet. We believe that such work could have a significant impact on the scalability prospects of BGP in coming years, particularly in light of the additional processing loads envisaged for deployment of secure BGP mechanisms..

• Common open-source packet filters that combine firewall and traffic shaping (such as ipfw, pf, netfilter and similar) currently do not classify based on traffic statistics, instead relying on direct inspection of packets passing through the filtering node’s local interfaces. Supported in part by a Cisco University Research Program (URP) grant, we will design and develop extensions for existing packet filters providing ML-based classification based on statistical properties and de-coupling of flow classification and treatment. Further, we will analyse the accuracy, performance and scalability of such a distributed system. 

• Characterizing the 'network load' introduced by popular online, interactive, real-time games. New protocols to improve the efficiency of server discovery. Estimating the impact of network degradations (such as latency and packet loss) on game play.
  

• This project aims to explore the practicality of leveraging 3D HTML5/WebGL/WebSockets technologies to provide a more intuitive, qualitative `view' into the state of home networks.

• What would happen if most of the Internet's capacity was at the edges, and content was pushed to caches in every suburb and city?

• Engineering the Internet to become a unified, resilient and reliable communications platform for billions of humans and orders of magnitude more devices embedded in our built environments.

• Developing techniques and methods for Lawful Interception of IP traffic. Meeting the competing demands of Law Enforcement Agencies (who need access to specific traffic) and user expectations (that traffic interception will not exceed those levels allowed by law, nor unreasonably weaken the Internet's overall security).

• How well do IPv4 and IPv6 approaches to Mobile IP perform under real-world scenarios? What needs to be done before a global, mobile internet service becomes an everyday experience?
  

• With IPv4 address pool exhaustion being imminent, it is of major interest to canvass to what proportion the allocated address space is utilised. Our goal is to estimate the rate of consuming IPv4 addresses, the proportion of allocated but underutilised IPv4 address space and the actual number of hosts (including hosts behind NATs). This should allow predicting the likely value and costs of an international IPv4 address market (potentially increasing the cost of Internet service) and setting the time frame of IPv6 deployment. (Prior to April 2014 this project was named "STING - Surveying The INternet's Growth")

• Design, analysis and prototyping of next generation transport protocols for the Internet. An umbrella research program encompassing a number of collaborative projects between CAIA, industry and other research institutions.
  

• TCP has provided congestion controlled, reliable data transport for over 25 years. However, TCP is expected to automagically operate well over a wide range of paths exhibiting diverse bandwidth-delay products and intrinsic packet loss characteristics. This project involves independent FreeBSD implementation (and performance analyses) of newer TCPs for high bandwidth-delay product paths (such as CUBIC and H-TCP),  improved instrumentation of the FreeBSD TCP stack for research purposes, and the development and implementation of a newer TCPs that infer congestion from variations in RTT.
  

• We have a number of projects supported in part by Cisco Systems's University Research Program since 2004.
  

Prior Programs

• CAIA's recent workwith the FreeBSD operating system's TCP stack resulted in a new modular congestion control framework and implementation of multiple modern TCP variants. In 2010 the FreeBSD Foundation funded us to clean-up and commit our congestion control patches (and various related improvements) to the main FreeBSD source tree.
  

• An in-house testbed for research into the performance characteristics of IP applications running over "broadband" access networks such as DOCSIS cable, ADSL, and 802.11.
  

• Supported in part by a grant from the Agilent Technologies Foundations (USA), and building on previous work at CAIA under the GENIUS and SONG project, we aim to development traffic generator tools and empirically proven models of large scale consumer broadband traffic. 
  

• We are associate founding members of a consortium building an optical, broadband network infrastructure in the City of Ballarat (Victoria, Australia). $4M funding by the Victorian Government's Department of Innovation, Industry and Regional Development was announced on July 25th 2002. The COLT project is lead by Dr Jonathan Spring of CEOS Pty Ltd.

• The FreeBSD Foundation has funded us to tidy up, extend and port DIFFUSE into the official FreeBSD source tree. 

• The dynamic classification and identification of network applications responsible for the creation of traffic flows offers substantial benefits to a number of key areas in IP network engineering, management and surveillance. This project, supported by a Cisco University Research Program (URP) grant, explores a novel method for traffic classification and application identification using Machine Learning (ML) techniques. 

• In late 2008 the FreeBSD Foundation funded us to improve congestion window handling with RFC 3465 Appropriate Byte Counting, improve the reassembly queue to provide dynamic tuning on a per connection basis, and incorporate SIFTR into the kernel to improve FreeBSD's fine grained TCP analysis and debugging facilities.
  

• Not really a project. Just a place to store random pictures associated with the centre.

• Qualitatively and quantitatively exploring the relationships between IP network traffic patterns and the energy consumption of devices such as routers, wireless access points and other infrastructure devices.
  

• Passively monitor selected unused IP addresses across an entire enterprise or ISP network, detecting unexpected or unwanted network scans and probing with minimal consumption of valuable IP address space.
  

• This project, supported by a Cisco University Research Program (URP) grant,  explores novel techniques for anomalous traffic detection and collaborative network control. We utlise existing, commercial 3D multiplayer game engines to combine two distinct roles: In-game avatars and entities represent fluctuating network events in real-time, and the game engine's metaphors for interaction inside the virtual world are used to control network entities out in the real-world.

• We've been a node as part of the SLAC PingER project. Our reverse traceroute server is up, and our current ping results can be seen here. (Suspended Jan 2005)

• What are the fundamental technological challenges that pose problems for the deployment of VoIP services? We're looking at improving QoS over bottlneck last-hop links, reliability and security, peering and number management, and implementation strategies.
  

• We've developed an automated approach to network re-configuration in response to detection of game traffic, and a suite of traffic simulation and modelling tools so ISPs can predict the impact of highly interactive applications (such as games) on their networks. Concluded 28 Feb 2007. (This is a spinout from our earlier GENIUS project.)

• This project implements and explores the potential of a 'stateless' TCP stack for handling DNS queries over TCP. We release our stateless TCP code as a patch against FreeBSD 9.x and demonstrate a functional DNS server answering queries over TCP while consuming substantially less server-side resources than a regular TCP-based DNS server. 

• Renamed to MAPPING in April 2014.
  

• Stockade is a TCP-layer tool for reducing the level of network traffic arriving at an SMTP server due to spammers. Stockade sits 'in front' of your mailserver, rejecting incoming TCP connections from known (or suspected) spammers. The rejection is statistical in nature, based on the presumed likelyhood of a new connection's source being 'a spammer'.