26 September 2014
Britain is now back at the forefront of optical fibre research.
While Britain invented optical fibre networking in the mid-1980s, it lost the lead in optical research during the Thatcher era. It’s now back on track thanks to Aurora, the dark fibre experimental network that connects researchers at Bristol, Cambridge, Southampton and University College London (UCL) via a central node in the capital.
Aurora is physically separate from Janet – the dedicated fibre network that links UK schools, universities and research labs nationally and internationally. Researchers can install their own equipment on Aurora to ‘light’ its fibres. The separate infrastructure means they have more freedom to test, break and reconfigure connections without disrupting normal internet access, and at much higher capacities than commercial networks.
“The result is an ideal ‘test bed’ for photonics research to support development of the future internet,” says Jeremy Sharp, Janet’s head of strategic technologies.
For example, access to Aurora helped UCL researchers produce two of the most downloaded IEEE papers this year. One showed how a new optical spectrally-efficient frequency division multiplexing (O-SEFDM) system operating at a lower modulation could add 25 per cent more bandwidth than present optical-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing. The other showed that congestion-aware routing in a non-linear elastic optical network could double network capacity compared to using shortest-path routing, and quintuple it if it was combined with a 6.25GHz resolution flexgrid.
Aurora’s second phase, Aurora2, goes live in September and extends the fibre network to Essex and Bristol universities. It is funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and Janet, with help from the UK e-Infrastructure programme. This guarantees funding for the fibre infrastructure and edge equipment for the next five years.
Research groups at other sites will also be able to make use of Aurora2, either by co-locating equipment in laboratories at one of the directly-connected sites, or by special access via other Janet network services such as VPNs or lightpaths.
Sharp says he is “hugely” excited by Aurora’s potential: “As well as supporting research on the future core optical network, Aurora2 will enable testing with experimental metro networks such as the Gigabit Bristol R&D network, which aims to create a city-scale digital infrastructure in Bristol, and wireless backhaul networks like 5G.”
He adds there is serious commercial interest driving all the research, with the UK photonics and electronics markets worth £10bn and £29bn a year respectively.
