Trevor J. Hall
Canada Research Chair in Photonic Network Technology
Tier 1 - 2003-01-01
University of Ottawa
Natural Sciences and Engineering
613-562-5800
thall@site.uottawa.ca
|
 |
Coming to Canada from
King's College London, UK
Research involves
Applying photonics technology to enhance the bandwidth capabilities of network routers; working with industry to test solutions and turn them into marketable products.
Research relevance
Will help to increase the speed and efficiency of traffic transmitted over a communications network.
Expanding the Power of Photonics
Today's photonics technology, or optical communications, can capably carry one terabit of traffic over a single optical fibre -- the equivalent of 16 million simultaneous telephone conversations. It is small wonder that photonics has become the implementation technology of choice for links between nodes of a communications network. Industry demand for this technology is growing at a tremendous rate. In order to keep pace, researchers are now concentrating on creating innovative petabit (1000 terabit/second) solutions, and on building new switches and network architectures that can extend photonic technology from the core to the edge of a network.
One of the leaders in this field is Dr. Trevor J. Hall, an experienced scientist with a strong background in applied physics and electrical engineering. Through a career spanning both industry and academics, Dr. Hall has gained international recognition as an expert in optical, optoelectronic and neural computing. His patented discoveries have greatly advanced the optical communications industry in Europe.
As Chair, Dr. Hall will be developing new photonics technology to increase the capacity of routers, which are often the cause of severe traffic bottlenecks in a photonics network. His key objectives include developing critical component and potentially disruptive technologies, devising new router and network architectures and control algorithms based on the latest photonics technology, building switch hardware demonstrators to test these architectures and algorithms with real traffic, investigating the self-similar structure of networks to understand how the various levels of hierarchy interact, creating realistic traffic models, and contributing to the development of a self-managed network that offers a defined quality of service.
Dr. Hall will collaborate with leading researchers at the Centre for Research in Photonics who share his interests. Together, their discoveries will help to increase economic growth in the form of spin-off companies and other types of technology transfer, and enhance the competitiveness of Canada's telecommunications and electronics industries.
|