Foundation Projects

This project is based on research that came out of Prof. Muriel Médard's group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which the team at Auckland University built upon with the help of Steinwurf ApS, a startup company Prof. Médard co-founded in Denmark with a German colleague, Frank Fitzek.

In previous ISIF-funded projects, the University of Auckland deployed their coding technology in the form of coded UDP tunnels across satellite links and added our home-grown titration technology to keep excess code overhead of the links. Steinwurf and its founders remain supportive of the project.

For the proposed project, the University of Auckland is partnering with Gravity Internet in Auckland who supply around 60 sites in the Chatham Islands with satellite Internet connectivity, including a community hub at Te One Primary School. The hub is currently being established under an Internet NZ funded project and the University intends to fit it out with its technology as part of the proposed project. Gravity will provide rack space, power, staff time and a satellite link and endpoint for testing purposes as an in-kind contribution.

The simulator lab, which has been supported by two previous ISIF grants, is based at the University of Auckland's School of Computer Science. The School has also supported the lab with significant amounts of CAPEX, space, staff time and scholarship contributions over the last few years and also serves as a conduit for graduate students involved in the research. The University also has close links with PICISOC, the Pacific chapter of the Internet Society, who have been very supportive of this work in the past, as well as with a number of Internet Service Providers in the Pacific Islands during the pilot field deployments.