Through the research profile HITS, High Quality Networked Services in a Mobile World, three students at Karlstad University have the opportunity to see their student projects become a reality as functionality in the systems of a niched technological company.
The students Ricky Andersson, Filip Västlund and Sebastian Salomonsson are in the last semester of their studies towards a Masters degree in Computer Science at Karlstad University. Their HITS-related degree projects are currently in progress in cooperation with the company Procera Networks.
"By completing their degree projects in cooperation with Procera Networks, Sebastian, Filip and Ricky have a chance to investigate problems that are relevant to an industry-leading Swedish company. In addition, the results may be used as functionality in the Procera Networks systems," says Johan Garcia, researcher in Computer Science at Karlstad University and supervisor for the three students'.
Procera Networks is a Swedish-American company which is developing and supplying systems used by network operators to monitor and manage their networks, and is also one of five partner companies in the HITS research programme at Karlstad University.
"I like the idea of working with both a company and the university," says Sebastian Salomonsson. We get a lot of help, support and knowledge from the university's research environment and at the same time it's very valuable to get insights from the company perspective."
One of the degree projects deals with developing an algorithm to classify traffic on the Internet and decide if it involves video transfer or not. This is done with the help of example data from a Procera Network systems in use by an operator. One of the other two projects continues along this line of inquiry by studying how such an algorithm can be implemented with optimal performance in relation to hardware restrictions, in this case adapted to the systems of Procera Networks.
"Today a great deal of Internet traffic is video transfer and if you can identify and classify this type of traffic you can also choose to handle it in a special way in relation to other traffic. In this way you can improve both for the video traffic and the other traffic", says Johan Garcia.
The third project investigates methods to estimate how many devices that are connected to one and the same internet connection. That is, how many devices are connected to the same router of one a subscription in a household, for instance. This can be useful knowledge to an Internet service provider and improve their understanding of how their customers use their internet connection.
Sebastian Salomonsson, Ricky Andersson and Filip Västlund agree that it is advantageous to carry out a degree project in cooperation with a company.
"It is particularly stimulating to know that what you do might be used by a company, in a real system. You are willing to go that extra mile."
About HITS
The research profile HITS was initiated in the autumn of 2014, funded by the KK Foundation. Together with five Swedish companies, Computer Science at Karlstad University is working to develop new and better network services that meet the demand of the increasingly mobile world. The aim of the cooperation is also to strengthen the competitiveness of Swedish industry.
The Knowledge Foundation funds research and professional development activities that are organised in conjunction with industry. In addition to academic quality, the Knowledge Foundation also requires industry to invest the same sum into each project that the Foundation has granted.
The purpose of the profile programme is to allow a university, in conjuntion with companies, to establish a research environment that can be expected to be nationally competitive and attract international attention.
