Jordi Perelló

Experimental Demonstration of an Impairment Aware Network Planning and Operation Tool for Transparent/Translucent Optical Networks

Core optical networks using reconfigurable optical switches and tunable lasers appear to be on the road towards widespread deployment and could evolve to all-optical mesh networks in the coming future. Considering the impact of physical layer impairments in the planning and operation of all-optical (and translucent) networks is the main focus of the Dynamic Impairment Constraint Optical Networking (DICONET) project. The impairment aware network planning and operation tool (NPOT) is the main outcome of DICONET project, which is explained in detail in this paper. The key building blocks of the NPOT, consisting of network description repositories, the physical layer performance evaluator, the impairment aware routing and wavelength assignment engines, the component placement modules, failure handling, and the integration of NPOT in the control plane are the main contributions of this study. Besides, the experimental result of DICONET proposal for centralized and distributed control plane integration schemes and the performance of the failure handling in terms of restoration time is presented in this study.

All-optical packet/circuit switching-based data center network for enhanced scalability, latency, and throughput

Applications running inside data centers are enabled through the cooperation of thousands of servers arranged in racks and interconnected together through the data center network. Current DCN architectures based on electronic devices are neither scalable to face the massive growth of DCs, nor flexible enough to efficiently and cost-effectively support highly dynamic application traffic profiles. The FP7 European Project LIGHTNESS foresees extending the capabilities of todays electrical DCNs throPugh the introduction of optical packet switching and optical circuit switching paradigms, realizing together an advanced and highly scalable DCN architecture for ultra-high-bandwidth and low-latency server-to-server interconnection. This article reviews the current DC and high-performance computing (HPC) outlooks, followed by an analysis of the main requirements for future DCs and HPC platforms. As the key contribution of the article, the LIGHTNESS DCN solution is presented, deeply elaborating on the envisioned DCN data plane technologies, as well as on the unified SDN-enabled control plane architectural solution that will empower OPS and OCS transmission technologies with superior flexibility, manageability, and customizability.

Optimal allocation of virtual optical networks for the future internet

Optical network infrastructures can be partitioned into multiple parallel, dedicated virtual networks for a physical infrastructure sharing purpose. However, different transport technologies may impact in both the amount and the characteristics of the different virtual instances that can be built on top of a single physical infrastructure. To analyse the impact of the transport technology in this regard, we present exact Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulations that address the off-line problem of optimally allocate a set of virtual networks in two kind of substrates: wavelength switching and spectrum switching. Both formulations serve the purpose to provide opaque transport services from the virtual network point of view, where electronic terminations are assumed in the virtual network nodes. We carry out a series of experiments to validate the presented formulations and determine which is the impact of both substrates in the number of virtual networks that can be optimally allocated in the transport network.

Strategies for Virtual Optical Network Allocation

This paper presents Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulations to optimally allocate Virtual Optical Networks (VONs) over a transparent optical network substrate. These formulations serve the purpose of building either completely transparent VONs or opaque ones, where electrical termination capabilities are assumed at each virtual network node. In addition, a lightweight Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search (GRASP) heuristic is provided for the transparent case. The obtained results validate the accuracy of the proposed heuristic and reveal the benefits of the presented solutions against simpler shortest-path-based VON allocation strategies.

Experimental demonstration of centralized and distributed impairment-aware control plane schemes for dynamic transparent optical networks

We demonstrate and compare distributed and centralized impairment-aware control plane schemes for transparent optical networks with dynamic traffic. Experimental results show that distributed scheme yields one fifth of setup time required by previously reported alternatives.

Lightpath fragmentation for efficient spectrum utilization in dynamic elastic optical networks

The spectrum-sliced elastic optical path network (SLICE) architecture has been presented as an efficient solution for flexible bandwidth allocation in optical networks. An homologous problem to the classical Routing and Wavelength Assignment (RWA) arises in such an architecture, called Routing and Spectrum Assignment (RSA). Imposed by current transmission technologies enabling the elastic optical network concept, the spectrum contiguity constraint must be ensured in the RSA problem, meaning that the bandwidth requested by any connection must be allocated over a contiguous portion of the spectrum along the path between source and destination nodes. In a dynamic network scenario, where incoming connections are established and disconnected in a quite random fashion, spectral resources tend to be highly fragmented, preventing the allocation of large contiguous spectrum portions for high data-rate connection requests. As a result, high data-rate connections experience unfairly increased bocking probability in contrast to low data-rate ones. In view of this, the present article proposes a lightpath fragmentation mechanism that makes use of the idle transponders in the source node of a high data-rate connection request to fragment it into multiple low data-rate ones, more easily allocable in the network. Besides, aiming to support such an operation, a light-weight RSA algorithm is also proposed so as to properly allocate the generated lightpath fragments over the spectrum. Benefits of the proposed approach are quantified through extensive simulations, showing drastically reduced high data-rate connection blocking probability compared to a usual contiguous bandwidth allocation, while keeping the performance of low data-rate requests to similar levels.

Optimal route, spectrum, and modulation level assignment in split-spectrum-enabled dynamic elastic optical networks

The spectrum fragmentation effect in elastic optical networks is one of their main limitations. Multiple techniques have been proposed to address this problem, with the split spectrum approach (SSA) being a very interesting candidate among them. This technique is based on splitting a demand into smaller sub-demands when a blocking situation arises. In split-spectrum-enabled networks, the route, spectrum, and modulation level assignment (RSMLA) problem that appears in elastic optical networks is further complicated due to the signal splitting operation. In this paper we present novel mechanisms to optimally attack this problem; various possible implementations of the SSA are also discussed. We highlight the benefits of the proposed mechanisms through illustrative results and compare the various implementation solutions in terms of average network cost.

Using spectrum fragmentation to better allocate time-varying connections in elastic optical networks

Elastic optical network (EON) technology arises as a promising solution for future high-speed optical transport, since it can provide superior flexibility and scalability in the spectrum allocation for seamlessly supporting diverse services, while following the rapid growth of Internet traffic. This work focuses on lightpath adaptation under time-variable traffic demands in EONs. Specifically, we explore the possibility of utilizing the spectral fragmentation to increase the spectrum allocation (SA) capabilities of EONs. In this context, a heuristic SA algorithm, which intentionally increases the spectral fragmentation in the network, is proposed and validated. In our proposal, the spectrum assigned to each new connection is in the middle of the largest free spectral void over the route, aiming to provide considerable spectral space between adjacent connections. These free spectral spaces are then used to allocate time-varying connections without requiring any lightpath reallocation. The obtained simulation results show a significant improvement in terms of network blocking probability when utilizing the proposed algorithm.

SDN-enabled OPS with QoS guarantee for reconfigurable virtual data center networks

Optical packet switching (OPS) can enhance the performance of data center networks (DCNs)by providing fast and large-capacity switching capability. Benefiting from the software-defined networking (SDN) control plane, which could update the look-up-table (LUT) of the OPS, virtual DCNs can be flexibly created and reconfigured. In this work, we have implemented and assessed an SDN-based control framework for an OPS node, where the OpenFlow protocol has been extended in support of the OPS switching paradigm. Application flows are switched by the OPS at submicrosecond hardware speed, decoupled from the slower (millisecond timescale) SDN control operation. By the DCN infrastructure provider, the virtual networks become directly programmable with the abstraction of the underlying OPS node. Experimental results validate the successful setup of virtual network slices for intra-data center interconnect and quality of service (QoS) guarantee for high-priority application flows. Data plane resources are efficiently shared by exploiting statistical multiplexing. In addition, the capability of exposing per-port OPS traffic statistics information to the SDN controller enables the implementation and experimental validation of load balancing algorithms to improve the QoS performance.

An Analytical Study of Control Plane Failures Impact on GMPLS Ring Optical Networks

Within the generalized multi-protocol label switching (GMPLS), link management protocol (LMP) has been proposed to maintain the connectivity of the out-of-fiber control plane. In this paper, we analytically quantify the impact of control plane link failures on whole network performance. Then, we use the obtained results to suggest the keep-alive interval for LMP, introducing the least overhead to the control network while keeping an acceptable network grade of service (GoS).