Broadband telecommunication means are of vital importance to run our modern society, which is becoming ever more dependent on information, at any time, anywhere. These means form the arteries and the veins for economic activities ranging from research to manufacturing, for transport, health care, banking, logistics, leisure activities, etc. They need to span the globe, but also have to reach out to the individual users. Broadband communication technologies are needed providing transparently ample communication capacity, both wireless and wired, at affordable costs for the end users, yielding a traffic-jam free communication world.
Aim and Mission: All network levels need to co-operate tightly in order to achieve flawless endto- end communication. Our vision is a seamless ultra-broadband communication network, the boundless communication ether , where connections between the hierarchical network layers are made fully transparent and end-to-end all-optical communication is established, with a possible exception for the last link to the user devices, which in the majority of cases will be by wireless radio signals (potentially also wireless optical signals). It encompasses all-optical traffic routing and interworking with wireless high-capacity last drop links to the end users, such that the user experiences a virtually congestion-free instantaneous access to any service demands he may have. The vision opens the route to the ultimate in flexibility and capacity of telecommunications, and augmented by means of seamless wireless (optical) connections to the user also to the ultimate in user mobility; thus the anywhere-anytime-anything-anyhow provisioning of broadband telecommunication services can be achieved. The common goal in this SRA theme is to provide the technological basis for such a wide-ranging self-organising (cognitive) network, which possesses the transparency to provide a wide variety of communication signals and the intelligence to locate by itself the resources with the adequate capabilities requested by the user. |
