Novel Transport Protocols for Modern Networked Systems and Applications

Brief description of the context of the research including potential impact.
This project will explore improvements to network transport protocols and
their interfaces to applications and operating systems. It seeks to improve
the security, robustness, and performance of data transfer on the Internet.
The work is done in the context of rapid changes in the network transport
protocol space, with the ongoing standardisation of the QUIC transport
protocol by the Internet Engineering Task Force, and its deployment by
Google and others, and the push to modularise transport protocols into
the transport services framework that allows novel, higher-performance,
and more upgradable implementations. The research methodology will be to
explore how modern programming languages and type systems can improve the
security and robustness of the network-transport interface.

Aims and objectives.
The aims of the project are to improve the interface between applications,
transport protocols, and operating systems, making it easier to implement transport protocols and improve performance and security.

Novelty of the research methodology
Novelty comes from the use of modern, type-safe, programming languages and library operating systems concepts, as opposed to the traditional monolithic kernel implemented in low-level, unsafe, programming languages such as C. The result will improve trust and security of the network and applications.

Alignment to Research Council's strategies and research areas, and Collaborators
The work aligns with the ICT theme, and in particular fits with the growth
area in pervasive and ubiquitous computing, and the ongoing interest in
programming languages, verification, and correctness of systems, especially
networked systems, transport protocols, and cyber-security of the network.