PASSION project: EU Scientists harness photonics to develop faster internet networks

The PASSION team has ambitions to reduce the current power consumption of the internet by ten times their current rates.

EU Scientists are harnessing next generation lasers to create light-speed broadband connections and remove the data bottlenecks that could cause the Internet to grind to a halt as demand increases.

A group of EU-funded researchers are incorporating VCSEL laser sources with silicon photonics to develop long wavelength, high capacity communications for the very first time, paving the way for light-speed metropolitan connectivity, and powering new ?smart” services like future gaming and on-demand TV.

Employed in the Apple iPhone X to scan a user’s face for Face ID,?portrait mode” photos and Animoji, and in its AirPod earbuds to sense your ears, a Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser (VCSEL) is a specialized laserdiode that promises to revolutionize fibre optic communications by improving efficiency and increasing data speed. They are cheap to manufacture and more efficient than traditional laser sources.

Future smart services require a massive overhaul of current internet infrastructure. Data ?bottlenecks” ? or internet ‘traffic jams’ caused by the sheer volume of users with increasingly sophisticated devices running, music,video, gaming, AI, VR and telecommunications ? urgently need to be freed up.

Super fast
These super-fast components have the potential to revolutionise smart services that consume enormous amounts of data for connected citizens of the future.With transmission rates up to 112 Tb/s, sending 28 thousand HD movies would take as little as 1 second.

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 to connect our cities.

Calling themselves PASSION, the research group is keen to exploit VCSEL light sources due to their high transmission efficiency and minimal power consumption.

Project coordinator Professor Pierpaolo Boffi commented, ?VCSELs are a bit of a buzzword at the moment. They have the advantages of low driving current, highlight-power conversion efficiency and high directivity. This makes them an ideal choice for transmitting huge amounts of data in a low cost, energy efficient way.”

?VCSELs will help us target the site of the ‘bottlenecks’: the Metropolitan AreaNetworks (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 PASSION team has ambitions to reduce the current power consumption of the internet by ten times their current rates.

?Our researchers are developing a flexible network architecture that will be optimized for metropolitan applications based on aggregated signal flows. Atenfold reduction in power consumption will be achieved by exploiting the full wavelength spectrum and the space dimension in a multi-core fibre,” Boffi added.

Light-speed networks
US internet technology giant Cisco predicts that internet traffic will grow to an unprecedented 3.3 trillion gigabytes (3.3 zettabytes) per year between 2016and 2021.

Inas little as 3 years from now internet usage is expected to reach 3 trillion internet video minutes per month, according to the Cisco report. To put this usage into perspective, this is five million years of video per month, or one million video minutes every second.

With the exponential growth rate of users, and the enormous amount of data being sent and received through complex devices, such as gaming, TV and telecoms, the internet as we know it, so project coordinator Professor Pierpaolo Boffi believes, will grind to a halt if nothing is done.

Boffi said, ?If we are serious about having super-connected citizens, using broadband services such as telework, improved entertainment such as HD and 3D TV on demand, or gaming, remote healthcare, assisted living, enhanced social networking, ‘eLearning’ for example, we need a fibre optic network that is leagues ahead of where it is now. We need a lighter and more flexible internet with low energy consumption. Otherwise, the future internet costs will be unsustainable.”

In order to support a low energy, sustainable communications infrastructure with new photonics technologies, the PASSION group came together to tackle the incoming capacity limitations in optical fibre networks in our cities.

?Fibreoptic networks for the effective transmission and routing of a huge amount ofdata in our cities have undergone frequent development in the last ten years.However we are now in a situation where bottlenecks in the transmission and the routing of data are becoming inevitable,” Boffi said.

?PASSION will come up with new transmission, detection, and routing solutions as well asan advanced network architecture based on innovative laser sources. These solutions ensure a transmission rate of more than 100 Tb/s per link and as witching capacity of over 1 Pb/s per node.”

VCSEL silicon photonics
Developing a new technological platform for their network components, the PASSION group will incorporate VCSELs, or Vertical-Cavity Surface-EmittingLaser Sources, to silicon photonics for the further reduction of the packaging costs of such a technology platform.

VCSELs,the key components in 3D sensing, are currently used in popular electronicsplatforms, for example, in range finders for smart phone cameras such as FaceID and Animoji.

However,deploying such a technology in silicon photonics for high speed internetconnections for the metropolitan area is a real challenge. PASSION projectmanager Paola Parolari, explains:

?VCSELs could be the next big leap in metro communications. They are already employed widely in data communications, in intra-data centre short-distance connections for example. However exploiting VCSELs, emitting at long wavelengths and integrated in silicon photonics to realize multi-channel modules with very high communication capacity can have tremendous impacts on the fibre networks of our cities in terms of cost, footprint and energy saving”.

Coordinated by the Politecnico di Milano the PASSION consortium secured a grant of?7,535,747 from the European Commission under the H2020 funding program and was funded under the Photonics Public Private Partnership.

PASSION comprises 14 partners with participants from 7 different European countries:(Italy) Politecnico di Milano and SM Optics; (Spain) CTTC, Telefonica and VLCPhotonics; (The Netherlands) Technische Universiteit Eindhoven and EffectPhotonics; (Finland) VTT; (Germany) Vertilas; (Israel) OpSys Technologies;(France) EPIC; and from 2 extra-Europe countries: (Japan) NICT and (SouthKorea) ETRI and ChemOptics.