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General Project Description Optical communications has become the dominant medium for high-speed communication, mainly due to the vast amount of
bandwidth available and the very low-bit error rates achievable, compared to their copper wire
predecessors. Optical networking has also evolved with the introduction of
intelligent optical nodes that can support features such as automated
provisioning of optical services and automated protection/restoration
capabilities to combat failure scenarios. As networks evolve to support more bandwidth-intensive applications,
and as rich multimedia and real-time services become more popular, next
generation infrastructures are expected to support traffic that will be heterogeneous
in nature with both unicast and multicast applications (e.g., high-definition
television, video conferencing, interactive distance learning, live auctions,
distributed games, and video-on-demand, etc.). The routing for multicast (and
broadcast) applications in optical networks is achieved by calculating a tree
that connects the source with all the destinations and assigning a wavelength
for the tree (thus creating a “light-tree”). Splitting in these networks is
achieved utilizing optical splitters at all network nodes. 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 or broadcast traffic where
a link in a “light-tree” carries traffic to multiple destinations. In
this project we will investigate the problems of provisioning and
survivability for transparent mesh optical networks that support multicast,
as well as broadcast applications. Novel provisioning techniques will be
developed that will provide solutions with lower blocking probability and
lower cost compared to existing techniques. Furthermore, multicast/broadcast
protection schemes will be devised that are capacity efficient and fast
compared to traditional link and path based approaches (dedicated and
shared). The algorithms designed will be incorporated in a software
simulation/design tool that can be utilized by network designers and
researchers to design and evaluate the performance of core mesh optical
networks when such applications are present. Additionally, a novel
optical control plane will be developed that can accommodate the deployment
of these provisioning and protection techniques. This software tool and control plane design will be
made available to telecommunications network providers in order for their
network engineers to better design, analyze, traffic engineer, and operate
their optical networks in light of the dynamic and highly fluctuant traffic
pattern of emerging multimedia applications and services with different types
of resiliency and performance requirements. 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. |
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