MULTIOPTI Research Program

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

Project Participants

Project Coordinator:

Prof. Georgios Ellinas holds a B.S., M.S., M.Phil, and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Columbia University. Dr. Ellinas is currently an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Cyprus. Prior to joining the University of Cyprus Dr. Ellinas was an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at City College of the City University of New York. Before joining the academia, Dr. Ellinas was a senior network architect at Tellium Inc. In this role, he worked on lightpath provisioning and fault restoration algorithms in optical mesh networks, and the architecture design of the MEMS-based all-optical switch. Dr. Ellinas also served as a senior research scientist in Telcordia Technologies' (formerly Bellcore) Optical Networking Research Group, where he performed research for the DARPA-funded Optical Networks Technology Consortium (ONTC), Multiwavelength Optical Networking (MONET) and Next Generation Internet (NGI) projects from 1993 to 2000. Dr. Ellinas also served as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University and the University of Maryland, teaching courses on multiwavelength optical networking in 1999 and 2000, respectively. He was awarded a Fulbright fellowship, from 1987 to 1991, for undergraduate studies at Columbia University, where he received the Armstrong Memorial and the William L. Everitt award at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University. Dr. Ellinas also received the Eliahu I. Jury award for the most outstanding Ph.D. dissertation in the Department of Electrical Engineering, the Jacob Millman graduate teaching assistant award and a fellowship from Bell Communications Research. He has co-authored two books on optical networks (J. Wiley 2007, Cambridge University Press 2008), he has authored and co-authored 5 book chapters and more than 120 journal and conference papers, he is the holder of 29 U.S. and international patents on optical networking and has 1 U.S. patent application currently pending. He was also awarded the most outstanding project/paper award in the 1996 OPNET competition for a project using OPNET as the simulator platform. He is a senior member of IEEE, and a member of OSA, ACM, and the Marie Curie Fellows Association.

New Researcher:

Tania Panayiotou received her Diploma from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Patras, Patras, Greece in 2005. Her Diploma Thesis titled �Optical FIFOS and flow control for transparent optical networks� was on the simulation of optical packet-switched networks, where she specifically studied the architecture and design of an optical packet switch for packet- and burst-based switching, and the development of a packet (and burst) routing algorithm for these networks (including congestion avoidance techniques). In 2006 she joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Cyprus where she has been conducting research on optical access networks, protection of multicast mesh networks, and multicast routing and wavelength assignment in transparent optical networks. For all the aforementioned problems she has developed extensive simulation software in order to model the networks and test and analyze their performance. Specifically, Mrs. Panayiotou developed (a) Simulation software for ONU placement in optical access networks. Optimization for the placement of ONUs was the ultimate goal in this project. (b) Simulation software for protection of multicast connections in mesh optical networks.� Implementation of existing techniques and improvement of these techniques with the development of new algorithms that enable the protection of the multicast connections in the network architecture utilizing less network resources. (c) Simulation software for multicast routing and wavelength assignment in transparent optical networks. Development of new algorithms for routing the multicast connections so as to minimize the maximum splitting in the network for various multicast group sizes. Mrs. Panayiotou�s general research interests include optical networks, wireless telecommunications networks and computer networks.

Team Members:

Dr. Antonis Hadjiantonis received his BEEE and MEEE from the City College of the City University of New York in 1998 and 2000, respectively. In 2005 and 2006 he earned the M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees, both in Electrical Engineering from the Graduate School of the City University of New York. Between 2005 and 2007 he was a Senior Researcher at SignlalGeneriX Ltd. where he worked on various research projects on optical networks. He is currently an Assistant Professor with the Department of Engineering at the University of Nicosia. His research interests include the vertical integration in multi-layer networking environments, routing and signaling algorithms in optical metropolitan and wide area networks, and first/last mile access network architectures. While at CUNY, Dr. Hadjiantonis received the prestigious Carell Dissertation Fellowship Award for his outstanding research in optical networking.

Antonis Lambrou received his Diploma with Honors from the Department of Electrical Engineering at Newcastle University, UK in 2007. He also has a Masters degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering, Imperial College, University of London with a specialization in Communications, 2008. Since 2008 he is part of the research group at SignalGenerix Ltd, working on various research topics, including design of software for telecommunications networks, digital signal processing and wireless ad-hoc sensor networks. Mr. Lambrou extensive experience in the area of Telecommunications Networks as well as in the design and management of simulation software will be crucial in the successful completion of the proposed project.