Karlstad University (KAU) is a public university in Karlstad, Sweden, and has around 16,000 enrolled students and 1,200 employees. KAU offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in a broad range of subjects, from engineering to humanities, with Bachelor’s, Master’s and PhD programmes. It has an open, creative and multidisciplinary curriculum. While being a young university, it has already attained a significant level of academic achievement, and the internal research funding is being restructured to further strengthen research groups that show international excellence.
The university is organized into two faculties and a number of Departments, where the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science is the one participating in MONROE. The Computer Science research group is focused on computer networking and computer security and possesses vast experience in areas such as transport protocol design, mobile communication, low latency communication, cloud-based services, privacy, and network security. As part of the aforementioned restructuring of internal resources, the research group recently received extended long term base funding from the University being selected as one out of two prioritized excellent research groups within the University. The funding was granted based on a highly competitive evaluation process, using international evaluators.
The Computer Science group is a very active participant in European projects and has been very successful in attracting international funding from the EU FP6 and FP7 Framework Programmes. Current participation includes the FP7 projects A4Cloud, RITE and Smart Society, whereas prominent past projects include PrimeLife, Prime, Newcom++, Daidalos and Fidis. Ongoing national projects are supported by the Knowledge Foundation of Sweden, the Swedish Research Council, and Internetfonden.SE. Funding for a six year research profile on High Quality Networked Services in a Mobile World, and in collaboration with regional national and international businesses, was just received by the Knowledge Foundation. The Computer Science group has a well-developed collaboration with the regional ICT industry. Collaboration with the surrounding society is an important mission for KAU, and the work by the Computer Science researchers in this regard was also awarded by the Rector in 2011. Computer Science researchers also contribute actively to standardization within the IETF and ISO.
Role in the project
The participating researchers from KaU bring in extensive expertise on transport protocol design, protocol performance in wireless networks, multipath communication and experimental performance evaluation. Within a recent nationally funded project (“How does large buffers affect the performance in Swedish 3G/4G networks?”) they have constructed a measurement platform and system for (stationary) mobile broadband measurements and investigated the extent of buffer bloat among four major national mobile broadband operators. Building on these experiences; both the construction of the research testbed, but also defining and constructing the experiment scripts; they will make significant contributions to both the system design and SW implementation in WP1 and the experiment work in WP3. KaU will also serve as the Work Package leader for WP5, being a significant provider of external user support.
Key personnel
- Dr. Anna Brunstrom
- Dr. Stefan Alfredsson