i++ School Newsletter

Week commencing 23 March 2009

Previous Newsletters

Field Trial on JANET Aurora

The Photonic Networks Laboratory has successfully completed a major experiment using the JANET Aurora Dark Fibre network.  This is the first significant experiment on this infrastructure. The field trial involved a novel 128 Gb/s optical grooming node, with transmission and switching in a dual ring network configuration being performed, which was realised by looping back the fibre at Chelmsford and Ipswich.
 
The experiment was coordinated by George Zarris at Essex and also involved researchers from four other European Institutions (Southampton, University College Cork, Karlsruhe and AIT-Athens).
 
The results were accepted on 22 March as a post-deadline paper in the Optical Fibre Communications (OFC) conference which has just taken place in San Diego.  They were presented on Thursday this week. 
 
OFC is the major international conference in the field of optical communications, and post-deadline papers are very prestigious (and heavily peer reviewed) as they report the very latest and most significant advances.
 
Professor Dimitra Simeonidou said, "Although my group regularly presents post-deadline papers at OFC, this is an important one as it announces our new infrastructure capabilities in a big way."

Staff news

Professor Richard Bartle

Professor Richard Bartle delivered the opening keynote at the recent conference on Computer Games/Player/Game Cultures at the University of Magdeburg, Germany. Professor Bartle reports; "Excellent conference, awful coffee."

Paper Accepted

Jonathan Nicholson, Epameinondas Gasparis, Amnon H. Eden, Rick Kazman, Automated Verification of Design Patterns with LePUS3, NASA Formal Methods Symposium—NFM (6–8 April 2009), Moffett Field, CA.