Consortium

University of Bristol is one of the UK’s leading research universities. UNIVBRIS has engaged in EU funded research for more than 20 years and has developed a dedicated support infrastructure, and experienced staff for participating in EU projects. High Performance Networks group (HPN), led by Professor Simeonidou, specializes in the application of advanced hardware and software network technologies for future transport and Data Centre networks. The group includes 4 academics (Prof. D. Simeonidou, Prof. R. Nejabati, Dr. G. Kanellos and Dr. S. Yan), 23 research staff including three research fellows (Drs. E. Hugues-Salas, Aloizio Pereira da Silva and A Tzanakaki) and post-doctoral researchers, 8 PhD students and one lab technician.

HPN specialises in the application of advanced hardware and software network technologies for future transport and Data Centre networks. HPN is an international leader and highly influential in the fields of optical networks, future internet research and experimentation, data centre and cloud computing, programable networks, software and hardware defined networking and more recently, 5G networks, smart city Infrastructures and AI assisted networking. Over the years the group has made significant breakthroughs in technology areas such as network slicing, software defined networking, QKD networking, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) orchestration, programable networks and virtualization for 5G and Smart City Infrastructures.

HPN has a strong experimental focus and has built an extremely well-equipped research laboratory. In addition, the HPN owns an experimental 5G urban test-bed including wireless, fronthaul, optical backhaul and packet core deployed in city centre of Bristol. This is one the of three 5G test-beds in UK funded by £16 million UK DCM program for building test networks to trial 5G technologies test-bed. As part of this program HPN led development and commissioning of the 5G UK Exchange, a novel 5G service brokering system enabling end-to-end 5G network service orchestration, and provisioning across multiple autonomous 5G network domains. Part of this work is publicly available as an opensource contributions to the ETSI based NFV orchestrators.

The HPN lab is also part of UK National Dark Fibre Facility (NDFF) and has dedicated connectivity to the national and international research network infrastructure through which has built close collaborations with leading research institutions in Europe, USA, Brazil and Japan. Furthermore, the HPN group coordinating the UK project INITIATE (The UK Programmable Fixed and Mobile Internet Infrastructure”. With INITIATE, a unique infrastructure interconnecting testbed in different UK universities will be established with the UK’s first SDN exchange.