Potential Projects

Potential PhD Projects

Potential 3rd/4th Year Projects

Projects will be available in a number of areas include:

Modelling and Hardware project in optical access networks
Modelling and Hardware/experiment in Radio Over Fibre
Hardware design and coding for Wireless Sensor Networks

Please email me if you would like to discuss these further

Specific 3rd/4th Year Projects:

Optical Performance monitoring demonstration. A recent PhD project has developed a novel soultion for performance monitoring in multi-wavelength40Gbit/s optical networks. This technique uses low speed electronic and digital signal processing to allow multiple impairments to be monitored in real-time. This technique has been shown to be feasible in a small laboratory demonstration. The aim of this project is to design and build the requist electronics to allow a large scale demonstration to be provided. This will involve the design of the optical/electrical stages, the digitisation stages and the associated control and processing software.
Development of a radio over fibre architecture. This project involves the contruction and testing of a set of radio-over fibre nodes to show the operation of a multi-channel radio access network that is distributed over optical fibre.
Next Generation Optical Access Networks. This project will consider the modelling and test of novel architectures for optical access networks.
Sensor Networks for Civil Infrastructure Applications. Continuting recent work, low-power and low cost sensor nodes are to be constructed and test to enable monitoring of civil infrastructure. The work will involve some hardware design as well as microprocessor coding.

Potential MSc Projects

Wireless Sensor Networks

Projects are available to desing, build and code devices for wireless sensor networks. These projects offer a mix of hardware and software design.

Effects of optical switch design for crosstalk reduction.

The level of optical leakage between channels in an optical switching matrix is a very important parameter for future all optical networks. This project aims to compare the relative merits of optical switching architectures with regards to inband crosstalk. The project will aim to simulate a network of optical Add Drop Multiplex and look into issues of how noise and other network impairments scale as the size of the network grow. Another option would be to look at including the impairments seen within the ADMs and cross-connects so that they may be included in route calculation algorithms such as OSPF.

Characterisation of Radio over fibre Networks

The transmission of high frequency (mm-wave) radio signal over fibre optics is becoming an exciting prospect for future wireless networks. One technique of interest involves up-converting a number of wavelength channels simultaneously using a single optical modulator. This project will involve characterising an optical network both analytically and experimentally. The system will transport a number of optical channels to a remote antenna site.

Other Projects in the area are also available.

Multi-user optical access networks.

The ideal situation in an optical access network is that the components in each home operator only at the bandwidth offered to each user (not at the sum of all users) but still share a single optical fibre. The aim of this project is consider the use of the radio technique MIMO to allow the mixing and reconstruction of multiple users data in a single fibre. It will involve analytical and simulation studies

Please email me if you wish to discuss any of these projects

This page last modified 4 October, 2010 by [John Mitchell]