Advancing Resilient, Cost-Efficient Optical Networks

Lead  Prof. PAN Kai

Department of Logistics and Maritime Studies

The research team has delivered a competitive advantage to a leading telecommunications corporation in China, initially by defining the formulation of a complex industrial problem concerning the resilience of national optical backbone networks.

Having formulated the problem, mathematical modelling by the team has provided the company with techniques to achieve an unprecedented 99.999% resilience against multiple fiber cable failures and reduce over 40% of hardware costs with cumulative estimated cost savings of HK$400M in China – solving what the company identified as ‘one of the key technical challenges in the next decade of optical communications.

The research team’s solution, which the company has now built into its planning pipeline, means that once implemented, they will have the means to support reliable connectivity for thousands of Internet Service Provider (ISP) partners and their millions of users.