IRELAND

Some time ago, when asked by a university magazine about what it was
that drove him and his work, Mark Davis offered a response that was as
short as it was revealing. ‘A puzzle’, he answered, ‘especially where I don’t
even know the right question to ask.’
This is a philosophy that has underpinned much of the very best of
Discovery Research across a broad spectrum of disciplines. It also
emphasises the spirit of open inquiry, of adventurous exploration that
has shaped the trajectory of much of Davis’s impressive career, which has
straddled the worlds of academia and industry. It was, after all, in
response to a ‘puzzle’ that Davis, the Director at Dublin Institute of
Technology’s Communications Network Research Institute (CNRI),
embarked on a research path that would end up a decade later, as much
by accident as design, in the creation of a successful company employing
ten people and with plans for future expansion.
In the early 2000s, after spells working in the Netherlands, the UK and at
home in Ireland, Davis joined the then recently established CNRI, which
had been founded in 2001 on the strength of the vision of the now
deceased Trinity College Dublin statistician, Professor John Lewis, and a
start-up grant from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), the ambition being
to find and apply mathematical techniques to, amongst other things,
analyse traffic flows on communications networks.
The environment clearly suited Davis. No sooner was he in the door of
the CNRI than he became involved with a project that entailed what he
later says was ‘probably the first use of Wi-Fi in Ireland’. Building on a
prior collaboration with Eircom and with funding support from Enterprise
Ireland, Davis and his colleagues established a Wi-Fi link between their
research building on Dublin’s Herbert Street and DIT’s campus on Kevin
Street, a distance of 1.5 km. This was an experiment that looked to
examine the feasibility of combining the technologies of Wi-Fi and Voice
over IP (VoIP) telephony.
What they found was not what they expected. Based on a simple analysis
of the capacity for fixed wireless calls, a link such as this should have been
able to accommodate 20 to 30 calls simultaneously, yet the reality was
that it was only accommodating about 3 or 4.
Hence the puzzle: what happened to cause the performance anomaly
and where did all the bandwidth go? Making sense of this conundrum
became the unexpected focus of Davis’s research endeavours in the years
that followed. After three years of further research, supported through
funding from Enterprise Ireland, his efforts - and those of his colleagues
- were rewarded. Their achievement was to develop a mathematical
framework that modelled the way in which bandwidth was shared out
among users of a Wi-Fi network, thereby enabling a network operator
to monitor and effectively control how the bandwidth is used. In practical
terms, it enables the operator to allocate, for instance, more bandwidth
to support bandwidth heavy services such as video streaming or,
alternatively, to enable priority treatment to premium customers.
The timing of this discovery, given the upsurge of interest in Wi-Fi in the
mid 2000s, appeared perfect. And so a patent was secured for the
discovery Ireland 96,97