MULTIOPTI Research Program

Multicasting and groupcasting with physical layer constraints in metropolitan optical networks with mesh topologies

                        

 

General Project Description

As networks evolve to support more bandwidth-intensive applications, and as rich multimedia and real-time services become more popular, next generation networks are expected to support traffic that will be heterogeneous in nature with both unicast and multicast applications (e.g., software and video distribution, distributed computing, etc.). There are also several potential applications for groupcasts in optical networks, where optical multipoint-to-multipoint sessions are set-up in wavelength-routed networks. Many applications that require groupcast are widely deployed, such as grid-computing, multi-party teleconferencing, distributed interactive simulations, virtual private network (VPN) services and Ethernet LAN (E-LAN) services to name a few. As wavelength-routed networks are deployed in great numbers to meet scalability and bandwidth requirements in next-generation networks, groupcast will be even more commonly utilized in optical networks to serve multipoint-to-multipoint bandwidth intensive sessions. Survivability, together with fault protection and restoration, is critical for high-bandwidth optical networks. More traffic is concentrated on fewer routes, increasing the number of customers that can be potentially affected by a failure. In these networks it is essential to have backup mechanisms to prevent the loss of information due to fiber cuts or equipment failures, which may occur often enough to cause major service disruptions. This loss could be even more crucial in the case of the multicast traffic where a link in a �light-tree� carries traffic to multiple destinations.

In this project we will investigate the problems of routing, grooming, and survivability for transparent optical networks that support unicast, multicast, as well as groupcast applications. In these transparent networks, where the signal stays in the optical domain for the entire path, efficient routing and wavelength assignment of multicast and groupcast connections becomes extremely important especially in light of the multiple splits that the signal undergoes and the physical layer impairments (crosstalk, dispersion, etc) that the optical signal� encounters. In the design of the algorithms the physical layer impairments will be taken into consideration during the provisioning of each application. The algorithms designed will be incorporated in a software simulation tool that can be utilized by network designers and researchers to design and evaluate the performance of metropolitan optical networks when such applications are present. In this way, more efficient networks can be deployed, thus lowering the cost of the network operation and the cost of the services offered to the clients of the telecommunications carriers and service providers.

 

 

 


 
�����������������������������������������������������������������