Waterford Institute of Technology (TSSG)

The Telecommunications Software and Systems Group (TSSG) in Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT) is a research centre with around 60 staff and students (comprising 5 WIT faculty members, 12 research students, the 43 full time contract staff working on research projects comprising project managers, post doctoral research fellows, engineers and programmers); all this activity is supported directly by externally funded competitive research awards. The core focus of the group is research into next generation converged telecommunications and Internet services and the management of the services and their infrastructures. Central to this focus is the replacement of IPv4 with IPv6 in next generation networks, in particular mobile networks, and the impact this has on end-to-end service architectures and security. The group has a portfolio of 46 (20 active in May 2005) funded research projects, 65% of which have been led by the TSSG. Funding sources for these projects include Irish SFI, HEA, Enterprise Ireland and TSR programmes, EU FP5 IST, FP6 IST, eTEN and Interreg programmes, and some sundry other sources including some direct industry sponsorship.

he ethos of the TSSG research programme is to develop a balanced portfolio of basic, and applied research (grouped together in the TSSG Research Division), pre-product research and commercial spin off activity (under the umbrella of the Commercial Division and its related spin-off companies), thus building an environment that captures the full complexity of the innovation life-cycle. We are already seeing the benefits of this approach in terms of the cross-fertilisation of ideas to and from all of these areas. The TSSG believe that IPv6 is ideally suited to such as broad base of interests as the range of issues it raises cut across all of these areas.