Datacenter networks have become the backbone of the global economy, and Artur Pilimon, a PhD student at DTU Fotonik, has received the Danish Telecommunications Award 2017 for his work in the field.
Global digitalisation has led to an enormous increase in data traffic and, as a result, large datacenters are being built everywhere. With his PhD project, Artur Pilimon aims to answer the question of how we can test something new and innovative at a larger scale before making huge investments in infrastructure and service deployment.
“What I did is a hybrid physical-simulated and electrical-optical Datacenter testing system, which can be controlled in a unified way by a Software-Defined Network controller. This could ultimately allow us to test new services and network architectures in a more realistic context at larger scale”, says Artur Pilimon about his project.
On October 11th 2017 PhD student Artur Pilimon won IDA’s Danish Telecommunications Award for his answer to how we can enable accurate Datacenter network performance evaluation with this hybrid testing system.
A Search for Higher Quality of Service and User Experience
The better and the more accurately we can characterize the performance of devices and different services before they are deployed, the higher the probability that the network operators will optimize their networks in the best possible way.
This translates into potentially higher Quality of Service and User Experience when using different types of communication services, not only social media platforms, but more critical and important areas, such as e-healthcare, banking sector, communication infrastructures for the Government, etc.
“We are striving to be at the forefront of the scientific research, tackling complex network communication problems, with the goal of contributing to building a more secure, reliable and efficient communication environment”, Pilimon finishes while reflecting on the research taking place at DTU’s Department of Photonics Engineering.
The PhD project is titled “High Performance Network Evaluation and Testing” and has been in the making these past 2,5 years. The testbed was further extended with new features when Artur Pilimon worked on the final demonstration for the EU project COSIGN.