[CAnet - news] US/EU Workshop on Optical Networking - Final Report

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Dear Colleagues,

We are happy to release the Final Report of the US/EU Workshop on Optical
Networking, held June 27-28, 2005, at the European Commission Premises in
Brussels.

The workshop website is located at:
http://networks.cs.ucdavis.edu/~mukherje/US-EU-wksp-June05.html

The final workshop report can be found at:
http://networks.cs.ucdavis.edu/~mukherje/US-EU-wksp-June05-Final-Report.pdf

Thank you.

=============================================
Biswanath Mukherjee

[Some excerpts from the report..]

There was a consensus that successful and high-impact research in optical
networking can be achieved by incorporating expertise from these diverse
disciplines, and is referred to here as "cross-layer design". In this
regard, roughly three layers can be identified: (1) the application layer at
the top (including control and management software); (2) the network
architecture layer in the middle, and (3) the physical (or optical
communications) layer at the bottom (mapping with the three
topics--software, architecture, and hardware--indicated above).


Application-Driven Architectures.
Many emerging applications in large-scale science communities require that
geographicallydistributed devices be connected by high-bandwidth pipes (with
quickly-reconfigurable capacities). The embedding of such a set of bandwidth
pipes is synonymous to the creation of a virtual private network (VPN), and
is referred to as a "Lambda Grid".1 This virtualization is
possible because the optical network actually consists of multiple levels.
At the lowest level, we have the topology of the fiber layout: fiber is laid
in bundles, so by splicing together fiber strands in different bundles, long
fiber links can be created. The collection of such fiber links
forms the physical fiber-link topology, which is embedded on the
fiber-bundle topology. Noting that each fiber strand can support many
wavelengths (160 today), an additional level of virtualization can be
performed, by considering wavelength-paths, called lightpaths, on the
fiber-link topology. Working recursively, and noting that the capacity of a
wavelength can also be sliced up in the time domain, one can create powerful
multi-level network architectures to suit the appropriate sets of networking
applications and their needs.

The corresponding research problems in multi-level networks, in general, and
Lambda Grids, in particular, need to be identified and attacked. It should
be recognized that the Grid idea has two very significant research
components: one on middleware and another on the optical
networking, namely on "Lambda Grid". The "Lambda Grid" is very appropriate
for the optical networking research agenda of the US National Science
Foundation's Networking Technology and Systems (NeTS) Research Program.

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