Transforming the Internet Infrastructure: The Photonic HyperHighway

Completed

Energy Efficiency(Residential and commercial)
Not Energy Related

Basic and strategic applied research

PHYSICAL SCIENCES AND MATHEMATICS (Computer Science and Informatics)
ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY (Electrical and Electronic Engineering)

Not Cross-cutting
Sociological economical and environmental impact of energy (Other sociological economical and environmental impact of energy)

Professor DN Payne
Optoelectronics Research Centre
University of Southampton

Standard

EPSRC

01 November 2010

30 April 2017

78 months

£7,288,968

Systems engineering

South East

NC : ICT

Professor DN Payne, Optoelectronics Research Centre, University of Southampton

Professor I D Henning, Computing and Electronic Systems, University of Essex
Dr WH Loh, Optoelectronics Research Centre, University of Southampton
Professor DJ Richardson, Optoelectronics Research Centre, University of Southampton
Professor D Simeonidou, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Bristol
Professor W Stewart, Optoelectronics Research Centre, University of Southampton

Project Contact, Fianium Ltd
Project Contact, BBC Research and Development
Project Contact, Oclaro

Our vision is to develop the disruptive component technologies and network concepts that will enhance our communications infrastructure 1000-fold to meet our 20-year needs, avert network grid-lock and reduce energy consumption.With continued steep growth in transmitted data volumes on all media, there is a widely-recognized and urgent need for more sophisticated photonics technologies in both the core and access networks to forestall a 'capacity crunch' in the medium term. Our Programme involves two world-class groups ideally positioned to satisfy this need and reinforce the traditional leadership of the UK in this area. All-optical technologies can also save considerably on the rapidly-rising energy consumption of communications systems (several % of global energy consumption, similar to air transport!), as well as substituting for travel, (e.g. Cisco's ultrawideband telepresence system has halved their large worldwide travel budget).This proposal is therefore focused on one of the most important challenges facing our modern society - an energy-efficient, ultra-high capacity ICT infrastructure able to connect people and businesses seamlessly everywhere. Traffic on the global communications infrastructure continues to increase 80% year-on-year, driven by rapidly expanding and increasingly-demanding applications: YouTube, MMS, iPlayer, new concepts such as cloud computing, tele-surgery, the introduction of the iPhone alone proved a severe drain on the capacity of major carriers. Bandwidth growth in the access network is starting to overwhelm the available capacity in the core. In the last 10 years, the number of broadband subscribers worldwide has grown 100-fold. We are now rapidly approaching the fundamental data carrying capacity of current optical technology; moreover, the energy required to support today's growing, power-hungry, ICT infrastructure is looking worryingly unsustainable. It is time to ask hard questions about some long-held assumptions.We propose a radical transformation of the physical infrastructure underpinning today's networks by developing devices capable of 1000-fold improvements in performance, starting with a critical re-examination of some of the most basic transmission building blocks - the optical fibres, amplification and regeneration, and nonlinear switching and distribution. Since the inception of optical telecommunications 40 years ago, the silica fibre has been its work-horse. However, as it nears its capacity limits, a radical rethink can reap dividends in non-linear threshold, transmission window breadth and loss through new materials and designs, leading to 1000-fold improvements. In addition, current power-hungry electronic switches are bottlenecks that photonics can alleviate. Although immensely challenging, the new technologies that we propose have the potential to lead to major advances and benefits in many other important areas - including security, the environment, manufacturing and healthcare. If we are successful in achieving our objectives, the Programme will surely establish the UK firmly as the world leader in optical communications and networking technologies for decades to come

10/01/11