WANs (Wide Area Networks) are considered as the global backbones of the present-day internet that help connect billions of devices differentiated by continents and are oceans apart. They are no less than the workhorses of the internet and the foundational ground upon which modern online services depend heavily on. Due to the advent of the coronavirus pandemic, reliance on online services are even more applicable now, and they are struggling to provide high bandwidth due to emerging workloads such as video calls, health care and machine learning.
WANs are connected for hundreds of miles through fibre optic cables responsible for transmitting data by light. These cables are present throughout neighbourhoods, comprising extremely thin strands of plastic or glass, referred to as optical fibres. Although they are known to be extremely fast, they are relatively less reliable. They can easily break during thunderstorms or animal accidents. These tears cause expensive and severe damage, like service outage of 911 services, inability to use smartphones and others.
Recently, a research group has introduced an approach that might preserve the internet network when fibres are down. They have unveiled a system known as ARROW that reconfigures the optical light of a damaged fibre towards the healthy ones. This is done through an online algorithm that predicts potential fire cuts ahead of time, based on real-time internet traffic demand. The new approach would be an incredible innovation for Optical Fiber Cable Market as it would reduce all the problems that were being faced by the world due to the sudden breakdown of cables in between, which would affect a lot of internet services collectively.
ARROW is built with the help of two distinct techniques. First is "Failure-aware traffic engineering," which is used for steering traffic towards the place where bandwidth resources are placed during fire cuts. The second is "wavelength reconfiguration," which works on restoring the failed bandwidth resources through light reconfiguration.
In addition, the system could be applicable for enhancing service availability and improve the resiliency of the internet infrastructure towards fibre cuts. The novel development is no less than a revolution in how the relationship between failures and network management is perceived. Before, failures were a complex reality, and there was no way of going around them; however, the problem of fibre cuts and subsequent losses can finally be better managed with the new system.
With the help of the new system, ARROW, many failures can be eradicated or partially restored. This change could potentially open further opportunities in risk assessment systems and traffic engineering systems.
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