14 DAY TRIAL // Finding the best and fastest fiber optic cable route is a process that, at times, can take days, but a team of researchers from the North Carolina State University came up with a way to speed things up by 10,000 times.
Phone calls, website visits and any other sort of online access relies on data being sent in the form of wavelength of light through a network of fiber optics cables.
Often, said data passes through rings meant to ensure that the information reaches its intended destination properly.
It is with said rings that the actual speed of transmission is determined, since they have to be designed in such a way as to always determine the most optimal optical cable route.
Unfortunately, the process of building the rings can take days, since current techniques of finding said optimal solutions aren't very speedy and involve data crossing many miles of cabling before determining the best option.
Things are made even more complicated by the fact that ring connections have to be modified constantly, in response to increasing traffic and changing user patterns.
Fortunately, some researchers from the North Carolina State University developed a technique that can make the process 10,000 faster.
“Problems that used to take days to solve can now be solved in just a few seconds,” said Dr. George Rouskas, computer science professor at NC State.
“This will significantly shorten the cycle of feedback and re-design for existing rings. It also means that the ring design work can be done using fewer computer resources, which makes it less expensive. This should allow network providers to be more responsive to user demands than ever before.”
The model creates a large graph of all paths in a ring and the points of overlap, which it then breaks down into smaller units composed of paths that don't overlap, meaning that they can use the same light wavelength.