Bell Labs Promises Efficient Networks

There’s a lot going on at Bell Labs, and eWEEK Europe got a good look at some of it at an open day in France.

As well as projects to lower the energy used by today’s mobile networks, and blue-sky thinking about what will replace them in future, we saw a wealth of ideas during a school open day – held by an organisation which has won seven Nobel Prizes.

The most visually impressive item was a cell tower powered by both solar and wind power, which could slash the fuel bills of networks in developing countries by 90 percent. Less obvious, but perhaps more far-reaching was a single flipchart page which described Massive MIMO, a next-generation-but-one concept that could provide 150 times the throughput of the LTE networks which have yet to replace today’s 3G mobile phone services.

Ideas from the Nobel factory

Alongside these headline acts, around forty projects were being demonstrated which addressed many aspects of network services, including their underlying provision and the applications they support.

Each had an enthusiastic Bell Labs demonstrator, competing for the attention of hundreds of delegates filing round the research facility at Villarceaux, the French arm of Bell Labs, established by the Labs’ owner, Alcatel Lucent. Among other things, in the years since it was established by Alexander Graham Bell, the Labs has invented the fax machine and the solar cell, as well as showing the first trans-Atlantic phone call, building the first 32-bit microprocessor, and creating the Unix operating system.

“Patents are important” said the president of Bell Labs in France, Jean-Luc Beylat, but he believes the Labs now have three very practical concerns: “high leverage networks”, “application enablement”, and the Alcatel Lucent Green Touch programme, which hopes to reduce the power demands of networks a thousand-fold.

100Gbps optical couplings

A demonstration showed an optical coupling that can transmit data at 100Gbps, and described plans to increase that speed at least four fold, as well as to increase the distance over which it will work. “We can reach 400Gbps over distances of several km in a few years,” said Bell Labs’ Jean Godin. Before that can be widespread, however, the technology would have to be turned into products and made a standard by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) – perhaps as the next generation of Ethernet.

The Labs also showed the experimental NMIP protocol – which could be vital to the “flatter” networks which are proposed – that use a lot more cells, including femto cells and Wi-Fi networks. As people use more data and move around, the smaller cells will massively increase the number of hand-overs between cells, and NMIP is designed to ease that.

“NMIP takes the complexity from the network,” explained Ivaylo Hvatcharev, research engineer at Bell Labs.

Security was covered by a project which plans to use statistical methods to detect botnets – malicious code running on computers under the control of a hacker. All the infected PCs acting as botnet agents have to communicate with their master, and usually do this through protocols,  without which an Internet connection cannot live, such as DNS.

Checking a PC’s DNS traffic for suspicious patterns could reveal the presence of a fast flux botnet which could be missed by anti-virus and firewall software, eWEEK Europe was told.

Mobile apps

Dekaps uses location information as well as image recognition and data scanned in from bar codes, to present “augmented reality” on an iPhone, directing the user with a compass-like tool and pasting descriptive signs onto the phone’s camera screen so the user knows what each building is around them.

Not so thrilling was a social networking education application, designed to allow students to crib notes from each other, see who else is reading an electronic Charles Dickens book at the same time, and find out which chapters are “hotspots” of comment and so worth reading .

For our money, that application didn’t demonstrate anything good enough to justify a network-centric app for a small controlled group instead of the broader access of normal social networking.

Some video conferencing applications played around with the image recognition to help place other colleagues in the conversation, while a mockup with avatars seemed to be a out making video conferencing more fun.

And a “web of things!” demonstration showed how web-enabled objects might allow a user to monitor and communicate better with his mother – flashing her light when ringing the phone, or beaming a webcam picture to her screen.