Communications and Networks (COMNET)

The Group covers a wide range of research interests:

• Optoelectronics, antenna design
• Signal processing, coding and information theoretical aspects of communication systems
• Wireless communications (including molecular communications), wireless networks and Internet of Things (IoT)
• Future Internet Architecture
• Network Security and Information Privacy
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) for communications and networking.

The COMNET group members publish in the best research outlets in the field including IEEE Trans. which evidence the excellence of our research. In addition to rich publications in mainstream journals this Group has a long history of collaborating with other research institutions and industries. The group has made fundamental theoretical and practical contributions where:

• The group attracted awards worth £4.1M in the REF period from the EPSRC, EU and Innovate UK.
• Reed and Al-Naday’s IP-over-ICN work has been included in the 5G standards (3GPP Release 16, Technical Specification Group Services and System Aspects; 3GPP TS 23.501 V16.1.0 2019-06).
• Walker’s pioneering research resulted in the world’s first 10GbE backbone link for trains achieving bandwidth capacity previously considered impossible.
• Essex researchers (Reed, Ghanbari, Masara) have pioneered new techniques for measuring the quality of speech and video transmitted over the Internet. This was result of collaboration with Dolby and Microsoft. The techniques were incorporated into Microsoft’s product Skype for Business and by 2016 was used to measure the voice quality of approximately 100 million users globally, including the US and UK.
• The group has rich testbeds which served within the networking hubs of many EU projects including H2020 POINT, a collaborative project proposing a radically new IP-over-ICN architecture to shape future Internet, and H2020 SerIoT, a collaborative project proposing intelligent approaches to perform anomaly detection using SDN and Blockchain technologies in IoT networks.
• The IP-over-ICN testbed developed by the group was demonstrated at two Mobile World Congresses (Barcelona), which is the premier showcase for the mobile industry.
• COMNET’s network testbed, together with its cloud and edge computing facilities, are also an essential part of a global testbed initiative IEEE InterCloud, where Yang was a founding member and one of the six executive committee members.

• We organise regular research seminars given by speakers from both academia and industries, covering a wide range of areas of communications and networks and their applications. For example, Mathias Kern (senior research manager) & Dr. Andrew Reeves of British Telecom (working on a project about Future Smart Infrastructure), Leah Claireaux of BT (security researcher in a Cyber Defence), Cesar Vargas (Head of Tecnologico de Monterrey), Dr. Shanpu Shen (Academic in Imperial College London), Louise Krug (leader of sustainability research programme within BT), Dr. David Kurka (Postdoc in Imperial College).
• In the COMNET group, Walker and Yang were Essex PIs of the European commission funded iCIRRUS in a project in partnership with ORANGE SA (France), WELLNESS TELECOM SL (Spain), ADVA (Germany), Interdigital Ltd (UK), among others. Reed, Thomos, and Yang were Essex PIs of the EU-funded project POINT in a project in partnership with Interdigital Ltd (UK), Primetel (Cyprus), RTWH Aachen (Germany), Aalto University (Finland), among others. Reed and Thomos were Essex PIs in another EU-funded project involving DT-sys (Germany), DT (Germany), ATOS (Spain), CERTH/ITI (Greece), among others. Academics from the group also participate in EU-funded actions aiming at building/strengthening collaborations between EU and Chinese research institutions such as CROWN (FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IRSES - Marie Curie Action) and CLIMBER (FP7-PEOPLE) and across Europe such as RECENT (H2020 MCSA-RISE), involving partners from UK, Portugal, Finland, and Turkey. 
• Walker has been appointed BT liaison Officer by the University of Essex. Successes include, for example, the reconnection of a fibre link between BT Adastral Park and the Colchester Campus, the instigation of five new taught MSc projects joint with BT, and first-time contributions to the Tommy Flowers Institute conference series.