Design for CHANGE
Mission Statement
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CTVR will deliver the evolvable, submissive and sustainable telecommunications of the future through excellent research in technology and networks, and will bring real economic value and global recognition to Ireland.
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CTVR carries out industry-informed research in wireless and optical networking for telecommunications. We have particular expertise in the kinds of technologies that will make networks flexible and evolvable and able to withstand change.
We live in a time of unprecedented change. Traffic on our telecommunication networks has grown exponentially in the last decade. Many of the services and applications that exist now were not even imagined a few years ago. Though we can extrapolate some trends and make educated guesses, we cannot predict exactly what lies ahead. Networks that are designed with change in mind will be more robust to disruption caused by growing demands and changing user patterns and yet-unimagined applications. The risks associated with investment in these kinds of networks will be lower as they will be more durable and scalable. Networks that are designed with change in mind will make effective use of resources (e.g. spectrum, bandwidth, power, processing capabilities, cooling capabilities etc.) and ensure a sustainable future.
Our approach to designing for change focuses on creating networks that are evolvable, sustainable and submissive.
Evolvable networks have elegant paths to future. To create evolvable networks we need to build flexibility and adaptability into the network using such technologies as tunable and adaptive photonics devices and reconfigurable radios. As well as designing key enabling technologies we also look at how these technologies fit together from the wider network perspective. Hence we think about flexibility on a network wide scale. We seek to map resources to where they are needed, when they are needed. We allow networks to be self-planning and self-organising. We also seek to understand where flexibility is not an option.
What we mean by sustainability in CTVR is that the network will have a persistent awareness of resource constraints such as manpower, energy, space, bandwidth, processing capabilities, storage, etc. We recognise that the scarcity of resources can be due to the limitsof physics or the finite nature of natural resources used to power the networks, and can be the result of prohibitive costs or static network resource management. What this means for our research is that we need to think about how networks and the components and devices that comprise the networks are designed in the first place as well as how a network uses the various resources it needs during runtime. The latter also demands a focus on how the functionality needed to deliver a persistent awareness.
To make a network submissive we avoid designing with particular resource ownership models in mind and instead seek to ensure that our networks can support many different models of ownership. The rules surrounding the use of the network should not, in as far as possible, unnecessarily label resources as belonging to one entity or another or unnecessarily stipulate which entity gets access to which resources. This means that the network architecture will be capable of supporting transient or even competing models of ownership as ownership of network elements (e.g., network resources such as bandwidth, processing power or memory, equipment, content, services, etc.) are transferred from one entity to another or shared by multiple entities or otherwise redistributed.
We base our initial work on a strawman arhcitecture that we believe exhibits characteristics of a network that is evolvable, susutainable and submissive, both because of the technologies that are used in that network and how those technologies are assembled and interconnected to form the wider network architect. Our research will allow us to determine whether the network has indeed these properties and to stress and strain the strawman architecture as we explore different usage scenarios and demand patterns. In parallel we build the underlying technologies. To understand what the technologies must be capable of we need a network perspective. To understand what the network is capable of, we need a technologies perspective. This is exactly what CTVR is about - the interplay between the technologies that will underpin the networks of the future and the wider network architecture.
The CTVR research is led by The Director Linda Doyle and the Co-Principal Investigators Jeff Punch, Ken Brown, Ronan Farrell, Frank Peters, Luiz DaSilva and Dave Payne.
Wireless - Linda Doyle, Luiz DaSilva, Ronan Farrell, Max Ammann, Cormac Sreenan, Tim Forde, Paul Sutton, Baris Ozgul, Irene Macalusi, Keith Nolan
Optical - Frank Peters, Dave Payne, Andrew Ellis, Liam Barry, John Donegan, Brian Corbett, Marco Ruffini, Cormac Sreenan Optimisation - Ken Brown, Barry O'Sullivan Thermal Management - Jeff Punch