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 e-Photon/ONe Virtual Departments
The optical industry has recently gone through hard times, and it is believed that one of the reasons is lack of coordination and misinterpretation of the technology and associated techniques. One of the aims of the NoE is to promote cross-disciplinary research beyond what is already performed between peer groups. Europeis already leading in many disciplines related to optical networking, but it is also obvious that cross-disciplinary research can be strengthened significantly. To implement such coordination, this NoE created a more formal structure in the collaboration between institutes about topics related to optical networking. This is based on the concept of Virtual Departments (VDs).
Virtual Departments (VDs) are designed to put together research groups that already have a history of excellent research in optical networking and that have expressed a special commitment to:
- forming consensus on key issues;
- strengthen the cooperation;
- enhance complementarity and mutual specialization;
- partially re-focus their research in order to cover also the issues that are not fully addressed yet within the VDs;
- foster international collaborations.
The activity planning is similar for all VDs, with similar and synchronized set of actions. For example, all VDs will periodically edit vision documents providing lists of key issues in the related technical fields, they will periodically report on the research activities endorsed by the VD, they will periodically collect published papers, and will coordinate techno-economical studies to assess the short-to-medium term feasibility of the studied technical approaches.
Note that these disciplines are not necessarily orthogonal among them; for example, transmission issues are common to core, metro, access and home networks. In some sense, our VDs are organised in a matrix structure, with VD-C, VD-M, VD-Aand VD-H in one dimension, and VD-S and VD-T in the other dimension. This is quite similar to the organisation of departments in a university, where e.g. the math and physics departments group basic competencies that are transversal to e.g. electronics and mechanics departments.
The six e-Photon/ONe+ VDs are:
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