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NDFF receives second equipment enhancement grant

National Dark Fibre Facility has been successful in securing a further round of grant funding for equipment enhancement. The equipment included in this proposal supports quantum-secured networking, sensing and experiments with novel spectrum usage, and intelligent network management.

Case study: Wideband optical transmission

Transmission systems are rapidly approaching maximum capacity. Expansion of the usable bandwidth of optical fibres offers a direct route to alleviating this challenge. Research by NDFF at the University of Southampton has made significant progress in this area in recent years.

Case study: Field trial of multi-layer slicing over disaggregated optical networks enabling end-to-end crowd-sourced video streaming

Optical networks face an increasing need to support new services with fast-response, real-time and on-demand requirements. Researchers at University of Bristol are experimenting with Crowdsourced Live Video Streaming (CLVS) over the NDFF optical network testbed to support the high-capacity and low-latency requirements for the large amount of traffic generated.

Context Aware Network project approved by EPSRC

CASMS proposes to create an interconnected network of Virtual Reality (VR) test-beds located at Liverpool University, UCL and, subject to confirmation, Bristol, in order to develop an integrated experimental platform that provides remote VR experimentation. The existing NDFF optical infrastructure will be used to interconnect UCL, Bristol and Telehouse at rates up to 100 Gb/s, while the Liverpool test-bed will be linked in via a 10GE Janet Lightpath terminated at Telehouse

Converged Networks project approved by EPSRC

COALESCE is a newly funded research project about interconnected testbeds for converged optical and wireless networks. It will create a physical network to interconnect existing test-beds at the different universities, using NDFIS

OFC and ECOC 2016 Improving the Tolerance to Noise in the Transmission of Optical Communication Signals

Southampton’s work on Nonlinearity mitigation in Transmission using Optical Phase Conjugation (OPC) was presented at IEEE/OSA OFC 2016. The experiments used WDM signals carrying 10 GBaud data encoded using 16-QAM and 64-QAM modulation formats, which were transmitted over 400km of the Aurora2 network. An optical phase conjugator was installed at the mid-point of the transmission, which gave rise to performance improvement through mitigation of the nonlinear phase noise generated during transmission