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Dan Kilper, Professor of Future Communication Networks, Trinity College Dublin
With the connection of a new international node, JOINER is opening up more than just borders.
The Dublin node is located in the Open Ireland testbed, which was launched by the CONNECT Centre and has been headquartered at Trinity College Dublin since 2020. CONNECT brings together 12 different universities and telecoms research institutes from across Ireland, and includes around 200 researchers. The Open Ireland testbed itself is unique, offering the equivalent of a large-scale Dublin-wide network — but contained within a lab.
This ‘metro network’ under lab conditions connects out to deployed networks across Dublin and into actual production environments, enabling us to do experiments in live settings under controlled conditions.
We also make use of dark fibre networks, meaning we can work on fibre-based solutions as well as experimenting with radio and optical connectivity. And while the main testbed is located at Trinity, we have connections that stretch west as far as Galway as well as down south to Waterford and on to Cork.
This infrastructure has enabled our continuing work in the AI space and on distributed sensors. We are actively developing decentralised, multi-party network AI and apps and tools that can work, end-to-end, across all components of a network. Within sensing, we’re working on ways to use fibre networks as sensors, and opening up the potential for subsea cables to detect tsunamis, deploy early warning systems, and protect critical international infrastructure.
With our new partnership with JOINER, this scale — and the potential for innovation — grows significantly.
The unique value of international collaboration
What becomes immediately clear when you start working with organisations in other countries is that even the most similar research areas can foster markedly different approaches. Whether in policy, desired outcomes, funding directions or even culture, these differences, and the grey space between them, provide an invaluable learning opportunity.
With JOINER, this will undoubtedly inform new approaches and innovation — and far more readily than they might otherwise arise.
This, then, is about more than just connecting and comparing technical capabilities and research focuses: the platform actively fosters a collaboration of perspectives. Social, cultural experiences alongside scientific, technical interactions.
Resources for shared national infrastructure
As networks and connectivity have become increasingly interwoven with people’s everyday lives, they have taken on a stronger international importance.
With that, countries are learning to work more closely together on improving and managing shared infrastructure, as well as how to store and handle data in different environments and jurisdictions.
There is, for example, a large submarine cable footprint shared between Ireland and the UK, and we have ambitions to realise a dark fibre submarine link for research between the two countries too. The JOINER platform will make these types of closer collaboration a more immediate, fruitful reality.
Researchers working across the island of Ireland have already developed plenty of experience of managing shared telecoms infrastructure. As such, the new Dublin node offers an immediate practical resource for figuring out the best and most efficient and sustainable ways to continue managing, sharing, and innovating with these resources.
More international expansion
We hope that this first overseas node will lead to others, strengthening and expanding our network as it grows.
There’s so much going on in France and Germany right now that fascinates me. There have been massive investments in 6G in Germany, and ground-breaking work being done at the Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz-Institut. France is leading the way with its programmes bringing academics and industry together, which is fostering interesting research. Greece, too, has lots of activity in the telecoms space, as does Spain, with the Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya.
These would all be strong connections to make. My hope is that the work we do here in Dublin will prove the value of these international partnerships.
Now is the time
This is the moment when JOINER can have the greatest impact, for the potential that it can unleash.
How we design and build networks is changing. This is partly because that change is being forced upon us: the scale of networks, the demands we place on them, and their importance to daily life is on a level not previously seen before. The historical way that we’ve been doing things is no longer enough.
We used to build everything on basic physics-based models, able to push all the uncertainties and what’s going on in the real world to the engineering margins. We can’t afford to have those margins anymore.
We need to collect real data from the world and take that into account, integrate systems so much more than we could in the past. As we develop end-to-end AI tools that function across networks, radio, optical, compute can’t remain siloed any longer.
JOINER’s now-international research infrastructure enables us to continue to take strides in this direction and make the progress that’s needed.