Biography

I am a Senior Lecturer in computer science within the School of Computing predominantly researching and teaching in Computer Networks at all levels in the undergraduate programme. I have held a variety of external examiner appointments for a number of University’s both at award, unit and validation levels, since 2008. Being part of the University Collaborative Programme Audit steering group has given me an overview of the variety of the University’s collaborative programme while aligning requirements with the QAA requirements.

I commenced lecturing at the University in 2001 within the department of Computer Science. I have since spent time as direct entry tutor working with four departments, ISCA, CT, CSSE and Maths providing pastoral support and designing the curriculum in such a way that academic support was embedded for students. I have managed a collaborative programme and been course leader for a number of undergraduate courses both delivered on and off campus covering a variety of delivery modes. Within my teaching I encourage all students to reach their own potential while challenging them to develop excellent research skills, resulting in many collaborating on small research projects.

Research interests

My main area of research is the quality of service (QoS) in ad hoc wireless networks. This focuses on networks that have no formal infrastructure. In maintaining good QoS the system must be interoperable, to accommodate of all types of categories of traffic ensuring efficient bandwidth utilization, though it is recognized that this alone is a challenging undertaking. Today’s applications continually demand higher bandwidths while the users demand better QoS. My research investigates techniques that provide a satisfactory balance of these requirements. QoS performance in the wireless environment presents many challenges, including bandwidth, delay, jitter, reliability and power issues.

Techniques include:

RHR, Resource Harvesting Redistribution, looking at load balancing in the WiMAX infrastructure ensuring all traffic priorities are serviced and none are starved of the required resources while improving call admissions for each nodes.

iABC, interactive Adaptive Buffer Control, a proposed systems that utilizes the control of a buffering system. This system ensures network provision for high priority users sharing the available bandwidth while accommodating adequate QoS.