The CSIRO Chairman's Medal honours the organisation's most outstanding scientific achievement. It is awarded to the scientist or team whose research is of national or international importance in advancing scientific knowledge, technology application or commercialisation.
In 2012, the Chairman’s Medal was awarded to the Ngara Backhaul Project Team for developing the world’s fastest 10 gigabit per second microwave link. This innovation has the potential to significantly improve broadband services in rural and regional Australia.
Ngara Backhaul Project Team has developed the world’s fastest 10 gigabit per second microwave link. This innovation has the potential to significantly improve broadband services in rural and regional Australia.
The development of the Ngara backhaul technology came about following the Federal Government's announcement in 2009 of the National Broadband Network (NBN) initiative that aimed to provide every Australian with faster and more reliable broadband access, and to help Australia become one of the world's leading digital economies.
The difficulty faced by the NBN was to provide high performance broadband communications to rural and remote Australian communities due to geographical and technological challenges.
In order for remote communities to have access to the NBN fibre network, they need to be connected to the rest of the nation via a backhaul system.
This is much like connecting small towns to highways via country access roads. The backhaul system needs to carry large amounts of data from the community to the fibre networks in a cost effective and efficient way. In many circumstances, fibre backhaul is either cost prohibitive or infeasible.
The other backhaul option is microwave, but existing commercial microwave backhaul systems can only provide a few hundred megabits per second data rates which cannot meet the increasing demand for broadband services.
The Ngara backhaul project team however have addressed this, having envisaged the need to develop superfast point-to-point microwave backhaul systems for future NBN as well as for the wider telecommunications industry. (Download the video.)
The Ngara backhaul provides tens of times higher data rates than existing microwave backhaul systems.
It also reduces the deployment cost and environmental impact by requiring much less communications equipment, such as antenna dishes.
A number of major technical challenges were solved and innovative solutions were created, resulting in a portfolio of five fundamental patents.
Team members are:
Dr Xiaojng Huang
Dr Yingjie Jay Guo
Val Dyadyuk
Dr Jian Andrew Zhang
Nipun Bhaskar
Dr John Bunton
Prof Tony Cantoni
Roshan Mark De Alwis
Alex Grancea
Jayasri Joseph
Ivan Kekic
Les Komarek
Christopher Lewis
John Matthews
Joseph Pathikulangara
Leigh Stokes
Keith Bengston
Dr Iain Collings
Carl Holmesby
Dr Ren Ping Liu
David Robertson
Dr Stephanie Smith