Solving the Internet capacity crunch: first demonstration of a multicore fibre network

With optical fibre networks gradually approaching their theoretical capacity limits, new types of fibres such as multicore fibres have been at the focus of worldwide research to overcome critical capacity barriers, which threaten the evolution of the Internet. The University of Bristol in collaboration with the National Institute of Information and Technology (NICT) have demonstrated successfully for the first time a multicore fibre-based network, which will form the foundation for the future Internet infrastructure. The research relies on Space Division Multiplexed (SDM) provided by the multicore fibres and on Software Defined Network (SDN) control, which are considered promising solutions to fulfil and control the ever-increasing demand for data consumption in communication networks. This collaborative work between the High Performance Networks Group at Bristol and NICT , Japan, represents the first successful demonstration of a fully functional multicore fibre network taking advantage of the flexibility and intelligence that SDN can offer in order to provide services to emerging Internet applications such as global cloud computing. The Bristol research team developed the SDN control based on extensions of the OpenFlow protocol and provided the novel network node equipment while NICT contributed multicore fibres (MCFs) and new transmission techniques based on self-homodyne detection (SHD). The implemented OpenFlow interface dynamically configures the network nodes in a way that the network can deal more effectively with application specific traffic requirements such as bandwidth and Quality of Transport.