Washington : A team of researchers has come up with a scientific solution that enables future internet infrastructure to become completely open and programmable while carrying internet traffic at the speed of light.
The current internet infrastructure is not able to support independent development and innovation at physical and network layer functionalities, protocols, and services, while at the same time supporting the increasing bandwidth demands of changing and diverse applications.
The research by High Performance Networks (HPN) group in the University of Bristol’s Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering addresses this problem with a new high performance network infrastructure that is open and programmable and uses light to carry internet traffic. It introduces new concepts of open source optical internet enabled by optical white box and software defined network technologies
Reza Nejabati, Reader in Optical Networks in the HPN group, said that the harrdware and software technologies reported in this paper can potentially revolutionised optical network infrastructure the same way that Google Android and Apple iOS did for mobile phones.
Nejabati noted that these technologies will hide complexity of optical networks and open them up for traditional programmers and application developers to create new type of internet applications taking advantages of speed of light.
The study is published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A. (ANI)