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The University of Western Australia Professors Antonio Cantoni, Zigmantas Budrikis and John Hullett have won a 2009 Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE) Clunies Ross Award for solving congestion problems in the broadband Internet.

In the 1990's Professors Budrikis, Cantoni, and Hullett joined forces in the Cooperative Research Centre for Broadband Telecommunications Networking - of which UWA was a partner - where they developed a countermeasure to congestions in broadband packet networks.

Their solution became known as Early Packet Discard .  Professor Cantoni said packets were data messages of arbitrary length, sent between for instance a website and a user, and for sending over a broadband network the packets were segmented into fixed length blocks or cells.

"To be received, a packet must arrive in its entirety; even only one cell missing makes the packet of no use at all.  So what would typically happen under heavier network load was that some cells would be lost in overflow, and nearly as many separate packets would become broken, needing to be re-transmitted.  The network would increasingly be transmitting more broken than whole packets and would be declared to be in congestion, in the end with no useful throughput," he said.

"We found a way of detecting the first and last cells of packets, and whenever a first cell would arrive for transmission, conditions would be determined whether overflow was imminent.  If it was, that first cell would be discarded and subsequently all cells of the packet, including the last, would be discarded as soon as they arrived.  That way no broken packets would ever come to be transmitted, the throughput could stay all useful up to capacity, and the network could never be congested."

The group's invention was patented in 1993 and assigned to Australian company QPSX Communications.  It was then licensed to most major international communications switch manufacturers, netting revenue for Australia in excess of $US35 million.  This was achieved in a highly competitive environment dominated by well-resourced multinational corporations.

Media references

Professor Antonio Cantoni (WATRI)  (+61 8) 6488 7251  /  (+61 4) 17 969 961
Janine MacDonald (UWA Public Affairs)  (+61 8) 6488 5563  /  (+61 4) 32 637 716