Ron Austin
Associate Professor
Ron has 17 years’ industrial experience working for Telewest, Energis and Cable and Wireless. He managed and built the Freeserve network before moving to Cable & Wireless where he managed the network management systems (Operational Systems Support (OSS)) for the Voice Over IP (VOIP) network.
Current Activity
- Associate Professor of Networks and Security
- Wireless networking and VoIP networks
- Advanced Network Design and Management within ISP networks
- SDN and Automation/Orchestration of network management systems
Also interested in student learning journeys and developing interactive material to aid and improve students' understanding of advanced network design and management.
Ron teaches on all networking related courses and is responsible for data networks and network security research within the School of Computing and Digital Technology.
Ron’s areas of interest within network security include ethical hacking and penetration testing, web security and network security.
Ron also has a research interest in e-books and distance learning. He is currently in the process of writing a eBook for his networking students.
Areas of Expertise
Ron's areas of interest and expertise are:
- Security technologies
- Network security
- Forensic and ethical hacking
- Wireless and mobile technologies
- SDN
- Automation/orchestration
Qualifications
MA Education
MSc Advanced Networks
Research
Ron has had five papers published on SDN and flows, and two papers published on virtual learning and remote learning as part of his MA in Education.
Publications
Papers published:
Austin. R., Sharma. M. R., Newell. D., Davies, P., Moore. P., (2013), Towards the Requirements for a Context Aware m-Learning System. ThinkMind.
Austin. R., Sharma. M. R (2013). Situated Computing and Virtual Learning Environments: eLearning and the Benefits to the Students Learning. IEEE.
David Newell, Philip Davies, Ron Austin, Mak Sharma, Philip Moore, (2015), Models for an Intelligent Context-Aware Blended mLearning System, In Proceedings The 29th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA 2015). The Third International Workshop on Intelligent Context-Aware Enterprise Systems (ICAES-2015), Gwangju, South Korea, March 25-27, 2015
Bull. P., Austin. R., Sharma. M., Pre-emptive Flow Installation for Internet of Things Devices within Software Defined Networks (2015) The 3rd International Conference on Future Internet of Things and Cloud (FiCloud-2015)
Bull, P., Austin, R., Popov, E., Sharma, M. and Watson, R. (2016) August. Flow Based Security for IoT Devices Using an SDN Gateway. In Future Internet of Things and Cloud (FiCloud), 2016 IEEE 4th International Conference on (pp. 157-163). IEEE.
Austin, R., Bull, P. (2017) August. A Raspberry Pi Based Scalable Software Defined Network Infrastructure for Disaster Relief Communication. In Future Internet of Things and Cloud (FiCloud), 2016 IEEE 5th International Conference.
Journal papers
Bull, P, Murphy, S, Austin, R and Bruno-Junior, N (2016) A performance analysis of pre-emptive flow-rule installation on SDN hardware (working title) – invited to target special issue of Concurrency and Computation – Practice and Experience.
Media Work
Ron Austin is one of the University’s dedicated team of trained media champions, and can comment on a range of subjects including:
- Network security
- Forensic and ethical hacking
- Computer networking
To arrange a media interview, please contact Birmingham City University Press Office on 0121 331 6738, 07967 271532,
email press@bcu.ac.uk or via Twitter @BCUPressOffice