Prof. Vincent W S Chan

Professor Chan’s research focuses on optical fiber networks, where the challenge is providing orders of magnitude improvement in performance at an affordable cost, an important theme for industry, indicates Chan. With other LIDS faculty, Chan is working on new optical transport mechanisms to radically change the responsiveness and cost structure of high-speed networks. Other projects include a new all-optical transport mechanism with extreme agility and new diagnostic techniques that rapidly locate all optical network failures. Research on free space optical communications over the turbulent atmospheric channel has begun to investigate fading mitigation techniques.

Chan's work in space communications is very new and still a step behind ground-based telecommunications. The future for the Internet is to use satellite and space links to provide service that mirrors that available on the ground. This poses significant challenges.