Philip Ji is a Senior Researcher in the Optical Networking and Sensing Department at NEC Laboratories America, where he has been researching optical switching, networking, and sensing technologies since 2001. He received his B.E., M.E., and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering & Telecommunications from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), where he focused on special polymer optical fiber and fiber optic device innovation.
His research interests include fiber optic sensing, WDM switching node and network architecture, fiber optic devices for communication, high-speed and high-capacity optical transmission, optical interconnects for the data center, and special optical fiber. Dr. Ji’s current research at NEC centers on the design and optimization of distributed fiber optic sensors and high-capacity optical networking technologies, with a focus on metro-access integration, network virtualization, and software-defined networking (SDN). He develops scalable, energy-efficient architectures that enable greater agility and automation in optical networks.
His work addresses key challenges in elastic bandwidth allocation, resource abstraction, and control-plane programmability, supporting the transition toward fully programmable, converged metro and access infrastructures. He leads initiatives that advance virtualization of transport resources and dynamic service provisioning, helping telecom and enterprise networks respond to rapidly shifting traffic patterns and service demands. His research contributes to the evolution of next-generation optical networks that are flexible, cost-effective, and ready for future application-driven architectures.
NEC Laboratories America groups satellites that travel together into mobile orbital domains, cutting routing tables by 96.81%, doubling route computation speed, and reducing load at bottleneck gateways by 22% across a 3,000-satellite Starlink simulation.
Dr. Yue-Kai Huang leads the new Optical Communications and Computing department at NEC Laboratories America. Learn about his background, the department’s likely research agenda in coherent transmission, self-managing networks, and photonic computing, plus the industry trends driving it.
We propose a virtual session ID-based satellite handover scheme for LEO satellite networks. The proposed scheme can significantly reduce latency spikes and packet loss during handover, thus achieving seamless session-level continuity and improved communicationperformance.
We demonstrate passive borehole velocity profiling using coherent DAS on a 3 km geothermal well. Deconvolution interferometry with phase-weighted stacking recovers interval velocities from ambient and ground micro-vibrations without active sources, achieving <80 m/s mean absolute error at 0.5–1 km depth against a calibration shot ground truth.
NEC Laboratories America is bringing a strong research presence to ECOC 2026, the European Conference on Optical Communications in Málaga, Spain. Researchers from the Optical Communications & Computing and Optical Sensing & Solutions departments will present papers, posters, and workshop talks covering underwater acoustic sensing, power-efficient submarine cable design, earthquake and tsunami monitoring through telecom fiber, and forward-transmission fiber sensing.
NEC Laboratories America has formed two new departments from its Optical Networking and Sensing group. Optical Communications and Computing, led by Yue-Kai Huang, and Optical Sensing and Solutions, led by Yue Tian, will carry the lab’s photonics research into new territory.
NEC Laboratories America will receive a 2026 Edison Patent Award for a patent that lets optical fiber carry both data communications and distributed sensing at once, reducing interference through counter-propagation and standard WDM filtering, validated across long distances of field fiber.
We propose a rapid state-of-polarization disturbance change-point detection and localization method using lossy coding length of kernel features. Field experiments validateaccurate detection of subtle changes and precise localization, enabling reliable fiber identification and monitoring.
We propose to jointly optimize path and gateway selection to achieve load balancing for mobile orbital domain-based hierarchical routing in satellite networks. The load at bottleneck gateway satellites can be reduced by 22% on average.
We present field trial on urban monitoring over telecom networks using Rayleigh-based distributed temperature/ strain sensor (DTSS), showing the capability of detecting subtle infrastructure signatures including manhole locations, road traffic, sprinklers and underground leakage events.