Research Overview

The Electronics Research Group (ERG) in the School of Engineering at the University of Aberdeen (UoA) has a long-standing reputation of work in IPv4 and IPv6, especially over challenging network paths, such as those exhibited by satellite systems.

Collaboration and Research Networks

ERG participates in the European funded reserach, UK National funding, European Space Agency ARTES research programmes, and fruitful research collaboration with UK industry

The group has been an active member of two international-leading Networks of Excellence:

The European Satellite Communications Network of Experts (SatNEx), conceived and originally funded as a part of the EC Framework Programme, and now supported with funding from the European Space Agency. This brings together key European research centres with a focus on the various technologies relating to the design of advanced telecommunications satellite systems
dot.rural Digital Economy Hub. Aberdeen University was awarded £11.2M to explore how digital technologies can enhance the delivery of crucial services such as healthcare, the environment, and transport in rural areas across the UK. The dot.rural Hub is one of three centres in the UK, with around 60 research staff and students. It draws together the University's research strengths in areas including computer science, Internet engineering, human geography, transport, healthcare, sociology, and environmental science. Experts from across these disciplines work together to understand and research digital technology requirements and develop and evaluate new solutions.

Research Topics in Internet Transport

Research is exploring Transport Layer design and performance. These implications range from ossification, that frustrates and delays deployment of new protocols and mechanisms, to methods that offer inappropriate incentives to application developers and network operators. Research is exploring new techniques, and new APIS to the tranport system.

ERG has a range of research activities linked to congestion control. These include research into safe ways to update the core TCP protocol, understanding how to deploy and evolve transport, research into multicast methods and other initiatives seeking to change the way people think about sharing Internet capacity. The group actively participates in the IETF in the Transport and Internet areas. It works with QUIC, UDP-options, DCCP and UDP-Lite.

The Changing Face of TV Transmission

The future of TV is all-IP service. Research in ERG has developed new transmission methods suitable for IP content. ESA ARTES-funded projects have developed IP-based methods such as the IETF Unidirectional Lightweight Encapsulation (ULE) and the DVB Generic Stream Encapsulation (GSE), both of which are now available in products. ULE is also a part of the Linux kernel.

A growth in IP-based transmission will enable a range of new opportunities: linking linear non-linear content, local contribution, ability to support a diverse range of qualities extending to UHDTV. Research is exploring new transport, and how these will be integrated to form an all-IP delivery architecture. New methods, are being explored, such as advanced caching to deliver high quality TV content.Recent ESA ARTES research has explored how TV can be transitionally from the MPEG-2 TS to an all-IP system, paving the way to a future converged service for Internet and broadcast transmission.

Satellite Access for Rural Broadband

Despite widespread access to broadband across much of the UK, many communities and individuals in rural areas do not have either ubiquitous access to the Internet nor broadband service access. The plight of these rural communities has been highlighted in the UK Government Digital Britain report. The challenges to delivering rural access are just no economic and require technical innovation.

Broadband satellite access technology targets both consumer and business applications where cabled and cellular mobile services can not offer cost effective broadband services. New generation satellite systems are emerging, and ERG is engaged in a range of research initiatives to ensure that these new systems:

Provide an experience as terrestrial access networks at an affordable cost,
Allow a seamless integration with the Internet,
Provide interoperability between subsystems manufactured by different vendors.

The ESA ARTES-funded HLS-MAC project is supporting standardisation for the Higher Layers Satellite (HLS) for the DVB-RCS2 specification.

Sensors and Networking

ERG is developing methods for smart Internet-enabled video monitoring. Research in video compression and processing algorithms will enable automated selection and subsequent display of imagery. Related research is seeking to understand cost/complexity trade-offs in video transmission, allowing applications to adjust their resource usage within user-specified constraints.

The WiSE platform represents a new paradigm in environmental data collection, enhancing flexibility, and accuracy with the potential to revolutionise data collection in a range of applications.