Dr Colm Browning, CONNECT Research Fellow at Dublin City University, has been awarded an SFI Investigator Research Grant (SIRG) to work on radio and optical communications.
The SIRG award aims to support excellent postdoctoral researchers and others who are yet to hold an independent research post in taking the initial steps towards a fully independent research career.
Colm will lead the COMPhLEX project at DCU.
“How society interacts with the internet is changing, and so too are the communications networks which underpin it,” he explains. “In order to deliver services such as ultra-high definition video steaming or virtual reality, future mobile communications networks must harness the advantages of optical fibre transmission and ‘cloud’ computing in powerful data-centres. This merging of mobile and data-centre networks presents unique challenges in terms of how they may be co-designed to operate in harmony.”
COMPhLEX will tackle those challenges by experimentally demonstrating how new optical technologies can be used to satisfy network requirements, and help sustain the growth of the internet. The project, which has recently begun and is funded through the SFI SIRG award, will bring together world-class expertise in the fields of radio and optical communications from the CONNECT and IPIC research centres in Ireland, as well as Columbia University in the United States”