The Digital Signal Processing (DSP) Centre at Bangor University, part of TITAN’s Lighthouse Project 4, has developed a prototype system at technology readiness level (TRL) 6 for DSP-enabled physical layer…
The Digital Signal Processing (DSP) Centre at Bangor University, part of TITAN’s Lighthouse Project 4, has developed a prototype system at technology readiness level (TRL) 6 for DSP-enabled physical layer security (PLS) in optical networks as a part of a project funded by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl).
In addition to existing cybersecurity techniques, PLS offers a new encryption dimension to enhance data network security significantly. The project successfully conducted a field trial in a 57 km deployed fibre test bed supported by Dstl and TITAN and provisioned by FibreSpeed. In the field trial, the prototype continuously encrypted and decrypted a 10 Gb/s optical data signal over 2 days. It showed that the PLS technique has excellent stability and reliability and is resilient to the environmental conditions associated with a fibre network infrastructure, such as temperature variations and physical vibrations, as the employed fibre runs close to a major trunk road and crosses two bridge structures.
The successful field trial of the DSP-based PLS prototype marks the first-ever demonstration of a DSP-enabled PLS technology at TRL 6 — a significant milestone for future optical network security, paving the way for cost-effective PLS in high-speed optical networks.
With the support of TITAN, the DSP Centre has also experimentally verified a second PLS technique entirely based on DSP. This technique has been demonstrated in fibre, converged fibre-mmWave and converged fibre-optical wireless networks, verifying its transparency to network type. This new PLS technique also has unique advantages, including security-by-design, openness-by-design, and dynamic security at traffic level, making it highly suitable for realising secure and resilient Network of Networks (NoN) architectures.
The research is a part of TITAN Lighthouse Project 4: Fibre Enabled Connectivity Integration. Lighthouse Project 4 (LP4) aims to enhance ultra-fast, reliable, and high-capacity data transmission.
TITAN is part of the Federated Telecoms Hubs (FTH) alongside CHEDDAR, HASC, and JOINER. Together, we conduct world-leading R&D and create a new knowledge-sharing framework, roadmap technology, develop skills, and engage with standards while instilling a commercialisation-focused mindset across academia.
If you have any questions about the research discussed in this article, please contact titan-enquiries@eng.cam.ac.uk.
