Research Area

Broadband networks

With the tremendous increase in traffic over the Internet, researchers started to use optical fibres to provide high capacity communication links with much improved efficiency. More recently, optical networks researchers have introduced wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), the technology of transmitting multiple data streams independently on a single fibre using different light wavelengths, to increase the network capacity many times over. In addition, “burst switching,” sharing the bandwidth in the time domain using very fast switches, has been proposed. However, these approaches introduce several challenging issues related to light path establishment and control, network architecture, optical switch architecture, routing and wavelength and time-slot assignment, optical network survivability, routing algorithms and protocols, network security and network management. Network access cost remains the big challenge for optical networks end users, stimulating research in the area of passive optical networks (PON), Ethernet PON and WDM-PON.

Applications of broadband networks and broadband Internet include multimedia communications, IP-telephony, video teleconferencing, e-commerce, web services and collaborative applications.