University of Bristol is one of the UK’s leading research universities. UNIVBRIS has engaged in EU funded research for more than 20 years and has developed a dedicated support infrastructure, and experienced staff for participating in EU projects. High Performance Networks group (HPN), led by Professor Simeonidou, specialises in the application of advanced hardware and software network technologies for future transport and Data Centre networks. The group includes 4 academics (Professor D. Simeonidou, Dr. R. Nejabati, Dr. G. Kanellos and Dr. S. Yan), 23 research staff including three research fellows (Drs. E. Hugues-Salas, D. Gkounis and A Tzanakaki) and post-doctoral researchers, 8 PhD students and one lab technician. HPN is an international leader and highly influential in the fields of Optical Networks, Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE), Grid and Cloud computing and more recently Smart City Infrastructures. Over the years the group has made significant breakthroughs in technology areas such as optical routing, optical packet and burst switching. In the mid-2000’s HPN introduced fundamental concepts regarding the use of optical networking for computational applications building the foundations of High Performance Clouds. More recently the group pioneered the application of Software Defined Networking (SDN) in optical and transport networks and has actively contributed towards the establishment of the new standards, technology demonstrations with industrial collaborators, and a number of invited journal publications, conferences and plenaries. Since 2010, the group has produced over 400 publications in peer-reviewed journals and international conferences of which many are invited, plenaries, highly prestigious post-deadline papers and several have received best paper awards. HPN has a strong experimental focus and has built an extremely well-equipped research laboratory. The HPN lab is part of UK National Dark Fibre Infrastructure Service (NDFIS) and has dedicated connectivity to the national and international research network infrastructure through which has built close collaborations with leading research institutions in Europe, USA, Brazil and Japan. The group has established bilateral research collaboration agreements with several international research institutes including iMinds (Belgium), CPqD (Brazil) and NICT (Japan). In addition, the HPN lab is part of the programmable e perimental city platform “Bristol is Open”. Furthermore, the HPN group has been recently awarded with the coordination of the UK project INITIATE which stands for “The UK Programmable Fi ed and Mobile Internet Infrastructure”. With INITIATE, a unique infrastructure interconnecting testbeds in different UK universities will be established with the UK’s first SDN e change. These laboratories will contribute many key capabilities for Internet research including optical networks, wireless/RF communications, the Internet of Things (IoT), SDN, Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) and cloud computing. The HPN group has a key role in the UK Quantum Communications Hub project in the work package 3 “Quantum Communications Networking” where the HPN aim is to implement SDN over off-the-shelf QKD resources under different scenarios.
Role in the project
UNIVBRIS will lead task T2.1 within WP2 with the studies of co-existence and network provision of quantum links. UNIVBRIS will also lead T6.5 with the definition of a programmable quantum ROADM and EPR node, and the activities in WP7 for performance evaluation in lab and field including demonstrations in the Bristol City network (BiO) and NDFIS. UNIVBRIS will lead task T7.3 with the integration of quantum links and setup of end nodes in BiO and NDFIS, and task T7.5 for the evaluation of UNIQORN systems in a real-world network environment.
Key Personnel
George T. Kanellos
gt.kanellos[@]bristol.ac.uk
Emilio Hugues Salas
e.huguessalas[@]bristol.ac.uk
Website