Our research

Exploring engineering advantages

The Future Communications Research Centre researches several areas that are at the cutting edge of communications engineering.

Learn more about our research themes below.

Dynamic full-spectrum communications

Target, track and communicate with a single drone or satellite in a complex environment, and ensure high-bandwidth data transfer.

Structured light offers:

• advantages for resilience under atmospheric turbulence
• potentially high bandwidth for communications with drone swarms.

Privacy-preserving semantic compression-based networks

Exploit semantics in communication – using content and context understanding to drive privacy preservation, connectivity and efficient content delivery.

Semantic compression uses similarities in data elements to enable compact representations where a single instance and a set of differences are used to represent a set of similar elements.

We aim to build content- and privacy-aware networks that transport user data in a compressed format, minimising the exposure of sensitive data to external adversaries.

Provable hardware-embedded security and privacy

Genuinely embed and guarantee privacy and security as an intrinsic part of the software and hardware of communications technology.

Cryptographic algorithms implemented at the hardware level not only improve communication speed, but also provide formal software security guarantees.

Hardware-embedded data privacy modules must be designed and implemented with provable security and privacy guarantees to avoid hardware-targeted attacks.

Anonymised quantum-based communications

For over a decade, mix networks have been studied and developed as a promising approach to:

• ensuring anonymity and secure communications
• defending against mass surveillance and censorship
• efficient communication in difficult environments.

Quantum communications offer new opportunities in this field, both from the perspective of high efficiency but also leveraging quantum noise to enable privacy-preserving unlinkable data streams.

We propose to develop algorithms for anonymous quantum communication with quantum differential privacy guarantees by adding noise with provable privacy and utility guarantees. We aim to make anonymous quantum communication fully secure and practical in the future.

Heterogeneous networks in space

Satellite technology is at a tipping point. It is possible to envisage large networks of satellites across multiple satellite orbital regimes providing flexible reliable communication services for a range of applications, including:

• low-data-rate internet-of-things devices
• high-bandwidth 5G mobile support.

The project will formulate a transformative new approach to coordinating heterogeneous satellite networking technologies to coordinate the large numbers of satellites, which:

• operate at different altitudes
• move at different speeds
• incorporate a diversity of radio and optical communication capabilities.