Natural and human-caused disasters can damage or destroy data and communications networks – and several presentations at the 2014 OFC Conference and Exposition next week in San Francisco will present information on strategies that can mitigate the impacts.
Disasters such as earthquakes, tornadoes, or even terrorist attacks, can damage data centres and the communication links between them, causing massive losses in data and costly disruptions.
To mitigate potential damage, researchers from the University of California, Davis, Sakarya University in Turkey, and Politecnico de Milano in Italy, first analysed the risk that a disaster may pose to a communications network, based on the possible damage of a data centre or the links that connect them to users. Then, they created an algorithm that keeps data safe by moving or copying the data from data centres in peril to more secure locations away from the disaster. The algorithm assesses the risks for damage and users' demands on the network to determine, in real-time, which locations would provide the safest refuge from a disaster.
'Our content placement solution can be implemented with some modifications on any existing settings of data centres and it is adaptable to different dynamic disaster scenarios,' said researcher Sifat Ferdousi of UC Davis. 'This can highly benefit the network providers in designing disaster-resilient cloud networks.'
Presentation M2H.4, 'Disaster-Aware Dynamic Content Placement in Optical Cloud Networks' will take place Monday 10 March at 3:15 p.m. in room 130 of the Moscone Center.
Natural disasters can also sever the optical fibres that carry data, leaving telecommunications networks useless. Wireless communication can fill the void and be part of a temporary, emergency network – but, for such a system to work, wireless technology would have to be integrated with the fibre-optic network.
Such an integrated wireless optical system would combine the speed and bandwidth of fibre optics with the mobility and range of a wireless network. This system could also be applied in home networks, in which data is sent via optical cables to the home then broadcasted wirelessly. One big challenge of an integrated system, however, is to develop the wireless links that can handle the speed and capacity of optical cables.
Researchers from Fudan University in Shanghai and ZTE, in Morristown, USA have now developed a new antenna architecture that allows for a simple and high-speed integrated wireless optical system. The design relies on two pairs of antennas, explains Jianjun Yu of ZTE.
Because each pair is polarised differently and isolated, there's no interference between the two pairs, allowing for a simpler structure and a larger transmission capacity. The new system achieves a data-transmission rate of 146 gigabits per second (Gb/s), which is the highest bit-rate-per-channel in a wireless signal shown so far, Yu says.
Presentation M2D.7, 'Antenna Polarization Diversity for 146 Gb/s Polarization Multiplexing QPSK Wireless Signal Delivery at W-band,' will take place Monday 10 March at 5:30pm in room 122 of the Moscone Center.
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