NICTA Victoria Research Laboratory

Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering
University of Melbourne

National ICT Australia (NICTA) plays a major role in the Australian Government's policy to promote science and innovation. It is capitalising on Australia's extensive ICT talent through world-class research, commercialisation, education, and industry collaboration.

In June 2004, National ICT Australia (NICTA) together with the University of Melbourne and Multi-Media Victoria established the NICTA Victoria research laboratory. This laboratory is located in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science on the Parkville campus of the University of Melbourne. We are actively recruiting graduate students to participate in our new and exciting research programs.

NICTA provides leadership, critical mass, research directions and industry contacts, to maximize the potential for real-world impact. It is about fostering creativity, providing support for new ideas, and increasing Australia's pool of skilled ICT people. It is broad enough to encourage the creation of fundamental research, as well as having a strong drive toward "use-inspired" research: the applied research that is necessary for economic impact. The commercialisation of NICTA's research outcomes is crucial for it to become an enduring research centre of excellence, which is one of NICTA's key goals.

To create the necessary critical mass and potential for impact, NICTA has focused on two "Priority Challenges": "Trusted Wireless Networks" and "From Data to Knowledge". The mission of the first priority challenge is to enable greater confidence, freedom, and capability through improved efficiency, reliability, and security of all wireless environments. The second priority challenge aims to produce social, environmental, and economic value from the gathering and use of information (further information on the web at: www.nicta.com.au.

The NICTA Victoria Laboratory has three research programs addressing both priority challenges: Sensor Networks, Network Information Processing, and Network Technologies.

Sensor Networks is a fascinating and important emerging area of ICT with a predicted enormous economic and social impact. A sensor network is a highly distributed estimation and control system, which must operate using low power intelligent sensors and low bandwidth wireless communication channels. The NICTA Victoria Sensor Network Program will implement a major sensor network in the area of environment monitoring, and will explore fundamental aspects of large distributed networks of sensors. This program opens up new research directions for control theory, network information theory, and network computing.

The NICTA Victoria Network Information Processing Program focuses on the management of data in large and complex networks such as the Internet. It will develop the infrastructure for managing these networks, and for performing computations over the network, new techniques for data mining, for improving scalability and robustness of critical network software, and improved mechanisms for accessing knowledge stored on the network.

The NICTA Victoria Network Technologies Program will develop new protocols and algorithms for high-speed optical and wireless networks. Our approach is to build systems and measure their performance: to understand the nature of network traffic, to find the weaknesses in current protocols, and to design new ones. Research on optical networks will focus on broadband access and the monitoring and control of the optical network. Research in wireless networks will focus on future wireless LAN technology including networking and security issues.

Research in the NICTA Victoria Laboratory will be supported by a Terabit Networking Laboratory, which will be linked to other high-performance research networks around the world.