The mission of the Electro-Optical Communications (ECO) group is to consolidate and extend its position as a leading international centre in the field of optical communication system technology, by providing an adequate technological infrastructure to support research and collaboration among academia and industry in photonics consortium efforts, performing leading-edge research, facilitating technology transfer to the industry, preparing students for professional careers in telecommunications, and promoting economic development in association with photonic system industries, telecommunication operators and component manufacturers.

In telecommunication networks all over the world, capacity demands keep increasing at multi-digit growth rates throughout every network segment, even despite economic downturns. Taking advantage of the unique low loss and wideband characteristics of optical fibre, there maintains to be a strong need for research worldwide in breakthrough optical networking techniques.
Our vision is that telecommunication networks need to evolve in the far-fetched future to a globe-spanning  “optical ether”:  an ultra-broadband congestion-free network interconnecting users via end-to-end all-optical transparent transmission routes. This vision encompasses the full hierarchical stack of network physical layers, and can be partitioned in three inter-twined parts: 1) long-to-medium distance ultra-high capacity data transport between the network nodes, 2) ultra-fast transparent data routing inside the nodes, and 3) bridging the heterogeneous final links to the end users in the access and in-building networks. These three parts are the lead motives of our research, and have led to the grouping of our research activities in three tracks:

*   The data transport track, in which techniques are researched for extending the bitrates and the reach of data transmission through fibre to ultimate levels; our research focusses here on exploiting additional wavelength bands of the fibre, on dense wavelength multiplexing and on ultra-fast optical time division multiplexing;
*   The data routing track, where techniques are under research for extremely fast optical signal routing and processing; our research efforts encompass efficient hybrid electro-optical solutions, as well as all-optical signal processing using ultra-fast semiconductor phenomena to reach the ultimate speed;
*    The user access track, where techniques are being researched to extend the transparency of optical networking as close as possible to the end users in order to provide them with a vast information capacity, in combination with flexibility and mobility. We do research in advanced optical techniques for dynamically reconfigurable access networks in order to provide capacity on demand, in high-capacity data transmission and multiplexing techniques for (polymer) optical fibre in-building networks, and in radio-over-fibre techniques in fixed wireless access as well as in-building network scenarios in order to combine the strengths of optical and wireless communication.

The complementary strength of our three research tracks is the key towards our vision of the “optical ether”.