Project COMANDER Seeks to Revolutionize Fiber-Wireless Networks

ENSCHEDE, THE NETHERLANDS - PhoeniX Software, which develops, supplies and supports software solutions for micro and nano technology corporations and institutes, has announced that four parties have teamed up to participate in the research project "Converged Optical-Mobile Access Networks with Dynamic and Efficient Resource allocation" (COMANDER), funded by the EU's Marie Curie Industry-Academia Partnerships and Pathways (IAPP).

Merging Optical and Wireless Infrastructures
COMANDER aims to bring together experts from industry and academia with the long-term goal of delivering a state of the art, cutting-edge and cost-efficient approach to the problem of Next-Generation access Networks (NGN) design. A successful NGN design must merge the currently distinct optical and wireless infrastructures into a unified network that combines the stability and ultra-high speeds of optical fiber networks with the agility and flexibility of wireless networks. In an attempt to revolutionize the networks of the future, COMANDER will investigate the convergence of the optical networks with ultra-high speed 60 GHz wireless signals that will boost wireless connectivity to new levels capable of handling the ever-increasing data demand.

Radio-over-Fiber Paradigm
To achieve this goal COMANDER employs a novel design that builds upon the Radio-over-Fiber paradigm, and proposes all the necessary solutions to overcome the existing limitations. At the end of the project COMANDER will deliver a novel Remote Access Unit (RAU) Module design and prototype device that will offer simultaneously 60 GHz wireless connectivity and fiber-to-the-home services to the user’s premises. In addition, COMANDER will go beyond the architectural convergence by introducing for the first time novel dynamic resource allocation schemes based on intelligent medium transparent access protocols and advanced network coding techniques that will unleash the full capabilities of the unified fiber-wireless architecture.

Collaboration Between Research Personnel
The scale and diversity of the NGN vision calls for the cooperation of many interdisciplinary experts from the fields of optical communications, wireless engineering, protocol design, network coding and simulation that up to now operated independently. COMANDER achieves these objectives through collaboration between research personnel between four partners: two from academia, (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, and Technical University, Berlin in Germany), and two from industry (PhoeniX Software B.V. in the Netherlands and Iquadrat in Spain). As a whole, the partners have complementary expertise in the engineering, design, analysis, simulation and experimentation that are needed to fulfill the project’s goals. The project started officially on October 1, 2013 and will run for four years. The project will share open information through its newly launched COMANDER website.