Network Convergence Laboratory

Home

Welcome to Network Convergence Laboratory (NCL) .

The Network Convergence Laboratory (NCL) at University of Essex specialises research concerning convergence at the network, service and device levels. The NCL has developed a number of analytical models and simulation platforms to evaluate traffic engineering principles for services and applications across heterogeneous fixed (electrical and optical), mobile and converged fixed-mobile networking architectures. The NCL is also active in developing future Internet architectures based on information-centric networking concepts and socially-aware network algorithm design.

From a practical perspective, the NCL maintains an extremely well equipped research network test bed that consists of electrical and optical core networking technologies within the lab and broadband wireless and optical access networking technologies across the University campus (Smart Campus) and surrounding areas. On top of the heterogeneous networking technologies is a rich set of (pervasive) service engineering middleware and toolkits which facilitate NCL’s research on QoS-enabled service creation, composition and convergence.

NCL complements another network-related group, High Performance Network Group (HPNG), which focuses on core networks (in particular optical networks), by concentrating its research activities mainly on access network (including both fixed access network technologies such as passive optical networks and mobile wireless networks).

NCL is divided into the following physical laboratories:

§ Network Laboratory (1NW.2.10B): hosting the network equipments and test-bed.

§ Service Laboratory (1NW.2.5): focusing on software design and development concerning network management, service engineering, etc. It is co-located with research associates and research students. Facilities in the Network Laboratory can be remotely accessed from the Service Laboratory.