Researchers are incorporating Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser (VCSEL) sources with silicon photonics to develop long wavelength, high capacity communications, which they say will pave the way for light-speed metropolitan connectivity, and power new ‘smart’ services like future gaming and on-demand TV.
A VCSEL is a specialised laser diode that could help to revolutionise fibre optic communications by improving efficiency and increasing data speed. With transmission rates up to 112 Tb/s, sending 28 thousand HD movies would take as little as 1 second, according to researchers.
Whilst VCSELs (favoured for their rapid data transmission and low power consumption) have been used in data communications for short-distance connections in intra-data centres, using these infrared lasers for long wavelength, and high capacity communications has never been done before.
Project coordinator, Professor Pierpaolo Boffi, said: “VCSELs will help us target the site of the ‘bottlenecks’: the Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) interlinking users within a geographical area where all the internet traffic from a local area flows, and cope with the exponential growth in users and increasingly sophisticated services like gaming, assisted living and on-demand TV.”
The team is hoping to reduce the current power consumption of the Internet by ten times current rates.
“Our researchers are developing a flexible network architecture that will be optimised for metropolitan applications based on aggregated signal flows,” continues Prof. Boffi. “A tenfold reduction in power consumption will be achieved by exploiting the full wavelength spectrum and the space dimension in a multi-core fibre.
“We need a lighter and more flexible internet with low energy consumption. Otherwise, the future internet costs will be unsustainable.”
Prof. Boffi concluded by saying that the team “will come up with new transmission, detection, and routing solutions, as well as an advanced network architecture based on innovative laser sources. These solutions ensure a transmission rate of more than 100 Tb/s per link and a switching capacity of over 1 Pb/s per node”.
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