The Telecommunications Software & Systems Group (TSSG) was founded in 1996. Since then, it has grown into a large research centre (over 35 active projects, over 80 completed projects, 150 active staff and students, and over €60Million in funding 1996-2010).

The TSSG is located in Waterford Institute of Technology’s new West Campus in Carriganore, Co. Waterford where it is colocated with business training and business incubation facilities. The TSSG’s research focus is on the dramatic changes occurring in the telecommunications software industry, and indeed on the wider converged communications industry, particularly in managing networks and in developing innovative new services for those networks. The unique aspect of the TSSG’s approach is that it embraces a wide range of research and development cultures, from blue-sky basic research through to commercial activity, each with a critical mass of activities. This integrative emphasis came from the original vision of its founder Dr. Willie Donnelly, who is now also the Head of Research in WIT.

The TSSG has established itself as the leading catalyst of high technology Information Communications Technologies (ICT) in Waterford and the South East having brought in €60 Million EUR of funding to WIT since its foundation in 1996, with 150 staff and students (Basic research = 10 staff and 20 students, Applied research = 60 staff, Commercialisation = 50 staff, Admin and support 10 staff). The TSSG receives no base-line funding, all its funding comes from competitive tendering processes for research funding. The Waterford Chamber of Commerce Award underpins the key emphasis in the TSSG of impacting on industry internationally, nationally and regionally.

This makes the TSSG unique in the Irish research landscape, as it has a very high level trans-disciplinary view of the communications services space, linking the science of the key basic research questions with the engineering expertise to create innovative prototype solutions in collaboration with mainly European partners, and combining all this with the entrepreneurial business vision to exploit a range of commercial opportunities that result. The TSSG explicitly addresses all elements of the innovation life-cycle, as not purely an academic research centre in the traditional sense.

The TSSG's main area of research is communications software services encompassing emerging architectures for management of complex telecommunications and Internet systems as well as next generation service development and deployment. The TSSG has strong expertise in the areas of distributed systems and service oriented architectures, particularly when applied to the communications and telecommunications domain.

The basic and applied research challenges addressed by the TSSG’s portfolio of projects and programmes include:

• Autonomic communications network and service management: developing the underlying theoretical models for allowing networks and services to self-manage, self-heal and self-configure (self-governance).
• Investigating the underlying infrastructural issues, relating to Quality of Service (QoS), security and mobility of IP-based (and in particular IPv6) communications services.
• Investigating the Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) paradigm for communications services, and in particular the use of this paradigm for the design and deployment of dynamically composed adaptive and pervasive services (in particular those that leverage contextual information).
• Exploring the accounting, rating, metering and billing issues relating to the previous themes including accounting for dynamically composed services, and accounting in autonomic environments.
• Tackling all of the above issues within the emerging context of IMS platforms (IP Multimedia Subsystem) - the core of the fixed-mobile convergence of mobile and traditional telecommunications networks over IPv4 and IPv6. This includes an understanding of lighter-weight approaches using pure Internet and SIP-based approaches.

The TSSG has two primary divisions - the Research Division and the Commercial (i.e. Innovation & Development) Division. Each of the divisions is composed of centres, each with its own thematic focus. Together the TSSG encompasses a balanced portfolio of active research projects reflecting a synergistic mix of basic research (strategically oriented), applied research, pre-product development, and commercial spin-off activities. Thus the TSSG sees itself as an exemplar of a new vision of research in Ireland that is both trans-disciplinary (combining mainly engineering, computing and business) and pursues a combination of academic and commercial excellence. The TSSG is the largest ICT group in Ireland engaged in such a critical mass of activity relating to communications software services, and indeed is one of the most successful integrated research clusters in any academic domain in Ireland.