Congratulations on your graduation, Doctor Rui Lin!
The topic of Doctor Rui Lins PhD dissertation is "High-Capacity Short-Reach Optical Communications"
Where are you from and where did you study before coming to KTH?
I come from China. I was studying in Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) before I came to KTH.
What is your topic and why did you choose it?
My research topic is high-capacity short-reach optical communications. The benefits of optical communication are the large capacity, low transmission loss, good security and many other advantages. It has now become one of the most important cable communications and has been widely investigated and deployed in long-haul transmission scenarios. However, with the increasing bandwidth requirement in short distance transmission scenarios, e.g., data centers, where the transponders are typically densely deployed, the exploration of the behavior in short reach communication and the proposal of low cost and low energy consumption solutions are in need.
Describe your topic in short.
Nowadays every one of us is connected by the ubiquitous network. Optical communication is a future-proof technique that provides high capacity and energy efficiency. Divided by the signal transmission distance, communication network can be divided into long-haul and short-reach. My work focuses on the short-reach communication networks including optical access networks that connects the end users to the metro network with tens of kilometers, and datacenter network that provides any-to-any server interconnection with up to several kilometers. My work is to design the architecture and sub-systems in the short-reach communication networks.
Tell me something about your results.
The results of my work turn out to be positive and provide options for the future short-reach communications, especially in the datacenter network part. Passive optical interconnect architectures are proposed and analyzed in terms of scalability. The proposed architecture is able to reduce the overall datacenter energy consumption by more than 20%.
What will the future bring for your research topic?
Optical communication plays a vital role in the era of data. Fiber-optic technology is no longer optional, or is only used to solve the most difficult problems of interconnecting technology. I am ready to make my own contribution in further advancing the optical communication technology to enable a highly connected world.
What are your future plans?
I have a great passion for continuing my research work. In the near future I will keep on going in academia and start by taking up a post-doctoral research position.