A Wayne State University scientist was recently awarded a $200,669 equipment grant from Sun Microsystems, Inc. to enhance the development of a High-Speed Networking laboratory in the computer science department.

The High-Speed Networking Laboratory is a site for research to advance the state-of-the-art in local, campus, and wide area computer networks. Recent achievements of the laboratory include the design and implementation of a low-cost, high-quality video conferencing system, which delivers high-quality audio and video to the desktop.

"This is an important development for our teaching program and our research,'" said Sherali Zeadally, assistant professor of computer science, the principal investigator who is developing the laboratory in WSU's State Hall.

"We are grateful to Sun Microsystems, one of the primary sponsors of the High-Speed Networking Laboratory, for their support of our research and teaching goals. "

Among other achievements, the lab developed a high-performance Audio-on-Demand (AoD) system that delivers multiple, high-quality, audio streams to networked clients.

Additional areas under investigation include: solutions to end-system bottlenecks, end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) architectures over both ATM and non-ATM networks (i.e. heterogeneous environments), protocol support for Gigabit networks, Java(tm) technology support for multimedia applications, operating system support for continuous media applications, and network performance evaluations.

Dr. Zeadally, who lives in Southfield, Mich., joined the faculty last August as an assistant professor after four years as an assistant professor in the department of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California.

He specializes in the design, implementation and performance of multimedia architectures running over high-speed computer networks.

"We will use the new Sun equipment, which includes several workstations and high-end servers equipped with high-performance adapters, in our networking research projects and for providing hands-on training in all networking and operating system classes for students at the undergraduate and graduate levels," said Zeadally.

This is an important upgrade for our program, said Zeadally, the founder and director of the High-Speed Networking Laboratory.