Gabriele Di Rosa
VPIphotonics
Light is the medium carrying information through the backbone of the world network and allowed for the first time in history to create a global community sharing culture and knowledge on a mass scale. To sustain this ever-growing trend, the WON project aims at increasing the amount of information available on the existing fiber-optic infrastructure. In this context, the topic of my work is the efficient transformation of these enhanced capabilities of light as a communication medium into effective transferred information.
Elliot London
Politecnico di Torino
The internet has profoundly changed modern society in uncountable beneficial ways, and is made possible only through extensive networks of fiber-optic cables, each transmitting mind-boggling amounts of data every second at unparalleled speeds: through light!
As the number of internet users continues to grow, so too does the amount of data that we need to send over these networks to get the same (or better!) service, which is no simple feat. Naively, we could simply continue to install more and more optical fibers… but there are many much smarter approaches.
One way is to extend the transmission bandwidth of the optical fiber, where data is sent over frequencies which are much noisier, giving a lower signal quality. Compensating for this reduction in signal quality in a wideband transmission scenario forms the foundation for my research; I use accurate, cutting-edge simulation tools to model the physical transmission of light through the fibers themselves – helping to piece together that puzzle that will allow mind-blowing future technologies such as fully integrated virtual reality!
Rasoul Sadeghi Yamchi
Politecnico di Torino
Light is the fastest thing in the world which is both a particle and a wave. With growing technologies and data centres like Youtube, Facebook, etc., the traffic of the networks increases, so the best solution to increase the networks capacity is to use wave characteristics of light. But how? Data can be carried on the light by using optical fibers. To use the whole capacity of optical fibre, it is good to increase the bandwidth of frequencies in an optical network. The aim of our project WON (Wideband-width Optical Network) is to investigate the advantages of this rise in the band (frequencies). My work as a researcher in WON is to analyse a whole network in regions like Germany, Europe, and the USA using wideband devices investigated by other team members.
Bruno V. de A. Correia
Politecnico di Torino
With the goal of sustaining the continuous increase of Internet traffic over the next years, enhance traffic capacity of light transmission over optical fibres is crucial, as backbone optical networks are the main way to cope with such high demand. In this context, the Wideband Optical Networks (WON) project targets the possibility of light transmission over spectral portions of the fibre not used in today’s systems.
Specifically, my research aims the optimization of those systems in terms of quality of transmission, as we add more spectral portions to the current commercially available systems. Besides that, we evaluate the benefits of those transmissions in network scenarios. Do perform that, we make use of advanced simulation tools, assessing both physical layer impairments and network capacity improvement.
Thyago Monteiro Sá Pinto
Danmarks Tekniske Universitet (DTU)
Optical Frequency Combs (OFC) can be seen as combs of Light since they correspond to a spectrum with equally spaced optical carriers (or lines). They are well known in the fields of metrology and spectroscopy, in the implementation of optical clocks and to study the interaction between light and matter, respectively. Recent advances regarding OFCs expanded their application over telecommunication as an alternative for multi-carrier or multi-band systems. Therefore, the optimization of OFCs is necessary for these setups and, here at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), working in particular on the ETN project WON, we are using machine learning tools to improve the many characteristics of these combs and their performance in optical communication systems.
Yu Wang
Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e)
The optical fiber communication technology takes advantage of the light’s speed and colour. Different colours of light carry different information for different purposes. The wavelength selective switch (WSS) can route the colourful light from any transmitters to any receivers. My research withing the WON project focuses on investigating, designing, and assessing novel modular wideband WSS able to operate the light from 1260 nm to 1625 nm with low power loss, low crosstalk, and high channel number.
Rafael Magalhães Gomes Kraemer
Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e)
Light management in future optical networks.
As current optical network communication systems involve sending multiple colours of light trough an optical fibre, separating these individual colors is an integral part of any modern optical communication system. My research focus is to come up with ways for managing and controlling these different colours of light as future wideband networks add more and more colours inside the optical fibre.