Bending light for faster and cheaper internet: New research
Scientists at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) recently devised a method to protect the network and cut costs when the fibre goes down. Their “ARROW” technology reconfigures optical light from a broken fibre to healthy fibres while utilizing an online algorithm to proactively plan for future fibre cuts ahead of time depending on real-time Internet traffic demands. ARROW is based on two distinct approaches: “failure-aware traffic engineering (TE),” which directs traffic to where the bandwidth resources are after fibre breaks, and “wavelength reconfiguration,” which recovers failed bandwidth…