Report available! Network remote powering through quasi-passive reconfigurable nodes

This project investigated the remote powering of the Internet using quasi-passive network nodes, where the power required for the providing Internet in remote network nodes without local power supply is remotely provided optically. The pump light for remote powering of network nodes is transmitted using the same data transmission fibre to reuse the existing network infrastructure. The major objectives of the project are to investigate, develop and optimize the network node and the remote power scheme, to increase the scalability, traffic handling capability and efficiency, via both theoretical study and numerical simulations.

The project was originally planned to be completed in 12 months. However, due to the interruption of COVID-19, the university campus was locked down for a prolonged period and no access to the university was allowed, This interruption resulted in delays in the project, and the project was completed at the end of May, 2021 (the research paper was published in mid December, 2021).

Although the project has been significantly affected by the COVID-19 situation, the project team managed to adjust the plan slightly to focus more on the theoretical study, modelling and analysis during this period. The main activities conducted in this project include:

The model of individual components in the node has been completed;
The signal propagation model in the network node has been built;
The theoretical model of the remote powering scheme has been established;
The remote powering scheme based network node has been analyzed theoretically and through comprehensive numerical simulations;
The complexity of the remote powering scheme based network node has been analyzed;
The impact of the opticam pump on the signal transmission in fibre has been studied;
The impact of different data modulation formats in remotely powered network node has been investigated;
The multiple optical pumps scheme has been proposed and studied to further increase the availability of power to nodes without local power supply, and two different configurations of the multiple optical pumps scheme have been analyzed and compared;
Large-scale optical networks with the proposed quasi-passive network nodes and remote powering technique have been simulated, and the statistical performance has been investigated.

The final report is available here.

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