Architectures and protocols for sub-wavelength optical networks: contributions to connectionless and connection-oriented data transport

La ràpida evolució d’Internet i l’àmplia gamma de noves aplicacions (per exemple, multimèdia, videoconferència, jocs en línia, etc.) ha fomentat canvis revolucionaris en la manera com ens comuniquem. A més, algunes d’aquestes aplicacions demanden grans quantitats de recursos d’ample de banda amb diversos requeriments de qualitat de servei (QoS). El desenvolupament de la multiplexació per divisió de longitud d’ona (WDM) en els anys noranta va fer molt rendible la disponibilitat d’ample de banda. Avui dia, les tecnologies de commutació òptica de circuits són predominants en el nucli de la xarxa, les quals permeten la configuració de canals (lightpaths) a través de la xarxa. No obstant això, la granularitat d’aquests canals ocupa tota la longitud d’ona, el que fa que siguin ineficients per a proveir canals de menor ample de banda (sub-longitud d’ona). Segons la comunitat científica, és necessari augmentar la transparència dels protocols, així com millorar l’aprovisionament d’ample de banda de forma dinàmica. Per tal de fer això realitat, és necessari desenvolupar noves arquitectures. La commutació òptica de ràfegues i de paquets (OBS/OPS), són dues de les tecnologies proposades. Aquesta tesi contribueix amb tres arquitectures de xarxa destinades a millorar el transport de dades sub-longitud d’ona. En primer lloc, aprofundim en la naturalesa sense connexió en OBS. En aquest cas, la xarxa incrementa el seu dinamisme a causa de les transmissions a ràfega. A més, les col·lisions entre ràfegues degraden el rendiment de la xarxa fins i tot a càrregues molt baixes. Per fer front a aquestes col·lisions, es proposa un esquema de resolució de col·lisions pro actiu basat en un algorisme d’encaminament i assignació de longitud d’ona (RWA) que balanceja de forma automàtica i distribuïda la càrrega en la xarxa. En aquest protocol, el RWA i la transmissió de ràfegues es basen en l’explotació i exploració de regles de commutació que incorporen informació sobre contencions i encaminament. Per donar suport a aquesta arquitectura, s’utilitzen dos tipus de paquets de control per a l’encaminament de les ràfegues i l’actualització de les regles de commutació, respectivament. Per analitzar els beneficis del nou algorisme, s’utilitzen quatre topologies de xarxa diferents. Els resultats indiquen que el mètode proposat millora en diferents marges la resta d’algorismes RWA en funció de la topologia i sense penalitzar altres paràmetres com el retard extrem a extrem. La segona contribució proposa una arquitectura híbrida sense i orientada a connexió sobre la base d’un protocol de control d’accés al medi (MAC) per a xarxes OBS (DAOBS). El MAC ofereix dos mètodes d’accés: arbitratge de cua (QA) per a la transmissió de ràfegues sense connexió, i pre-arbitratge (PA) per serveis TDM orientats a connexió. Aquesta arquitectura permet una àmplia gamma d’aplicacions sensibles al retard i al bloqueig. Els resultats avaluats a través de simulacions mostren que en l’accés QA, les ràfegues de més alta prioritat tenen garantides zero pèrdues i latències d’accés molt baixes. Pel que fa a l’accés PA, es reporta que la duplicació de la càrrega TDM augmenta en més d’un ordre la probabilitat de bloqueig, però sense afectar en la mateixa mesura les ràfegues sense connexió. En aquest capítol també es tracten dos dels problemes relacionats amb l’arquitectura DAOBS i el seu funcionament. En primer lloc, es proposa un model matemàtic per aproximar el retard d’accés inferior i superior com a conseqüència de l’accés QA. En segon lloc, es formula matemàticament la generació i optimització de les topologies virtuals que suporten el protocol per a l’escenari amb tràfic estàtic. Finalment, l’última contribució explora els beneficis d’una arquitectura de xarxa òptica per temps compartit (TSON) basada en elements de càlcul de camins (PCE) centralitzats per tal d’evitar col·lisions en la xarxa. Aquesta arquitectura permet garantir l’aprovisionament orientat a connexió de canals sub-longitud d’ona. En aquest capítol proposem i simulem tres arquitectures GMPLS/PCE/TSON. A causa del enfocament centralitzat, el rendiment de la xarxa depèn en gran mesura de l’assignació i aprovisionament de les connexions. Amb aquesta finalitat, es proposen diferents algorismes d’assignació de ranures temporals i es comparen amb les corresponents formulacions de programació lineal (ILP) per al cas estàtic. Per al cas de tràfic dinàmic, proposem i avaluem mitjançant simulació diferents heurístiques. Els resultats mostren els beneficis de proporcionar flexibilitat en els dominis temporal i freqüencial a l’hora d’assignar les ranures temporals.The rapid evolving Internet and the broad range of new data applications (e.g., multimedia, video-conference, online gaming, etc.) is fostering revolutionary changes in the way we communicate. In addition, some of these applications demand for unprecedented amounts of bandwidth resources with diverse quality of service (QoS). The development of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) in the 90's made very cost-effective the availability of bandwidth. Nowadays, optical circuit switching technologies are predominant in the core enabling the set up of lightpaths across the network. However, full-wavelength lightpath granularity is too coarse, which results to be inefficient for provisioning sub-wavelength channels. As remarked by the research community, an open issue in optical networking is increasing the protocol transparency as well as provisioning true dynamic bandwidth allocation at the network level. To this end, new architectures are required. Optical burst/packet switching (OBS/OPS) are two such proposed technologies under investigation. This thesis contributes with three network architectures which aim at improving the sub-wavelength data transport from different perspectives. First, we gain insight into the connectionless nature of OBS. Here, the network dynamics are increased due to the short-lived burst transmissions. Moreover, burst contentions degrade the performance even at very low loads. To cope with them, we propose a proactive resolution scheme by means of a distributed auto load-balancing routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) algorithm for wavelength-continuity constraint networks. In this protocol, the RWA and burst forwarding is based on the exploitation and exploration of switching rule concentration values that incorporate contention and forwarding desirability information. To support such architecture, forward and backward control packets are used in the burst forwarding and updating rules, respectively. In order to analyze the benefits of the new algorithm, four different network topologies are used. Results indicate that the proposed method outperforms the rest of tested RWA algorithms at various margins depending on the topology without penalizing other parameters such as end-to-end delay. The second contribution proposes a hybrid connectionless and connection-oriented architecture based on a medium access control (MAC) protocol for OBS networks (DAOBS). The MAC provides two main access mechanisms: queue arbitrated (QA) for connectionless bursts and pre-arbitrated (PA) for TDM connection-oriented services. Such an architecture allows for a broad range of delay-sensitive applications or guaranteed services. Results evaluated through simulations show that in the QA access mode highest priority bursts are guaranteed zero losses and very low access latencies. Regarding the PA mode, we report that doubling the offered TDM traffic load increases in more than one order their connection blocking, slightly affecting the blocking of other connectionless bursts. In this chapter, we also tackle two of the issues related with the DAOBS architecture and its operation. Firstly, we model mathematically the lower and upper approximations of the access delay as a consequence of the connectionless queue arbitrated access. Secondly, we formulate the generation of the virtual light-tree overlay topology for the static traffic case.Postprint (published version

On Integrating Failure Localization with Survivable Design

In this thesis, I proposed a novel framework of all-optical failure restoration which jointly determines network monitoring plane and spare capacity allocation in the presence of either static or dynamic traffic. The proposed framework aims to enable a general shared protection scheme to achieve near optimal capacity efficiency as in Failure Dependent Protection(FDP) while subject to an ultra-fast, all-optical, and deterministic failure restoration process. Simply put, Local Unambiguous Failure Localization(L-UFL) and FDP are the two building blocks for the proposed restoration framework. Under L-UFL, by properly allocating a set of Monitoring Trails (m-trails), a set of nodes can unambiguously identify every possible Shared Risk Link Group (SRLG) failure merely based on its locally collected Loss of Light(LOL) signals. Two heuristics are proposed to solve L-UFL, one of which exclusively deploys Supervisory Lightpaths (S-LPs) while the other jointly considers S-LPs and Working Lightpaths (W-LPs) for suppressing monitoring resource consumption. Thanks to the ``Enhanced Min Wavelength Max Information principle'', an entropy based utility function, m-trail global-sharing and other techniques, the proposed heuristics exhibit satisfactory performance in minimizing the number of m-trails, Wavelength Channel(WL) consumption and the running time of the algorithm. Based on the heuristics for L-UFL, two algorithms, namely MPJD and DJH, are proposed for the novel signaling-free restoration framework to deal with static and dynamic traffic respectively. MPJD is developed to determine the Protection Lightpaths (P-LPs) and m-trails given the pre-computed W-LPs while DJH jointly implements a generic dynamic survivable routing scheme based on FDP with an m-trail deployment scheme. For both algorithms, m-trail deployment is guided by the Necessary Monitoring Requirement (NMR) defined at each node for achieving signaling-free restoration. Extensive simulation is conducted to verify the performance of the proposed heuristics in terms of WL consumption, number of m-trails, monitoring requirement, blocking probability and running time. In conclusion, the proposed restoration framework can achieve all-optical and signaling-free restoration with the help of L-UFL, while maintaining high capacity efficiency as in FDP based survivable routing. The proposed heuristics achieve satisfactory performance as verified by the simulation results

Design and protection algorithms for path level aggregation of traffic in WDM metro optical networks

Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) promises to offer a cost effective and scalable solution to meet the emerging demands of the Internet. WDM splits the tremendous bandwidth latent in a fiber into multiple non-overlapping wavelength channels, each of which can be operated at the peak electronic rate. Commercial systems with 128 wavelengths and transmission rates of up to 40 Gbps per wavelength have been made possible using state of the art optical technologies to deal with physical impairments. Systems with higher capacities are likely to evolve in the future. The end user requirements for bandwidth, on the other hand, have been ranging from 155 Mbps to 2.5 Gbps. Dedicating a wavelength for each end user will lead to severe underutilization of WDM channels. This brings to forefront the requirement for sharing of bandwidth in a wavelength among multiple end users.;The concept of wavelength sharing among multiple clients is called grooming. Grooming can be done purely at the optical layer (optical grooming) or it can be done with support from the client layer (electronic grooming). The advantage of all optical grooming is the ease of scalability due to its transparency as opposed to electronic grooming which is constrained by electronic bottlenecks. Efforts towards enhancing optical grooming is pursued through increasing optical switching speeds. However, technologies to make optical switches with high speeds, large port counts and low insertion losses have been elusive and may continue to remain so in the near future.;Recently, there have been some research into designing new architectures and protocols focused on optical grooming without resorting to fast optical switching. Typically, this is achieved in three steps: (1) configure the circuit in the form of a path or a tree; (2) use optical devices like couplers or splitters to allow multiple transmitters and/or receivers to share the same circuit; and (3) provide an arbitration mechanism to avoid contention among end users of the circuit. This transparent sharing of the wavelength channel utilizes the network resources better than the conventional low-speed circuit switched approaches. Consequently, it becomes important to quantify the improvement in achieved performance and evaluate if the reaped benefits justify the cost of the required additional hardware and software.;The contribution of this thesis is two fold: (1) developing a new architecture called light-trails as an IP based solution for next generation WDM optical networks, and (2) designing a unified framework to model Path Level Aggregation of Traffic in metrO Optical Networks (PLATOONs). The algorithms suggested here have three features: (1) accounts for four different path level aggregation strategies---namely, point to point (for example, lightpaths), point to multi-point (for example, source based light-trails), multi-point to point (for example, destination based light-trails) and multi-point to multi-point (for example, light-trails); (2) incorporates heterogenous switching architectures; and (3) accommodates multi-rate traffic. Algorithms for network design and survivability are developed for PLATOONs in the presence of both static and dynamic traffic. Connection level dedicated/shared, segregated/mixed protection schemes are formulated for single link failures in the presence of static and dynamic traffic. A simple medium access control protocol that avoids collisions when the channel is shared by multiple clients is also proposed.;Based on extensive simulations, we conclude that, for the studied scenarios, (1) when client layer has no electronic grooming capabilities, light-trails (employing multi-point to multi-point aggregation strategy) perform several orders of magnitude better than lightpaths and (2) when client layer has full electronic grooming capabilities, source based light-trails (employing point to multi-point aggregation strategy) perform the best in wavelength limited scenarios and lightpaths perform the best in transceiver limited scenarios.;The algorithms that are developed here will be helpful in designing optical networks that deploy path level aggregation strategies. The proposed ideas will impact the design of transparent, high-speed all-optical networks.</p

Scalable fault management architecture for dynamic optical networks : an information-theoretic approach

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2008.MIT Barker Engineering Library copy: printed in pages.Also issued printed in pages.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 255-262).All-optical switching, in place of electronic switching, of high data-rate lightpaths at intermediate nodes is one of the key enabling technologies for economically scalable future data networks. This replacement of electronic switching with optical switching at intermediate nodes, however, presents new challenges for fault detection and localization in reconfigurable all-optical networks. Presently, fault detection and localization techniques, as implemented in SONET/G.709 networks, rely on electronic processing of parity checks at intermediate nodes. If similar techniques are adapted to all-optical reconfigurable networks, optical signals need to be tapped out at intermediate nodes for parity checks. This additional electronic processing would break the all-optical transparency paradigm and thus significantly diminish the cost advantages of all-optical networks. In this thesis, we propose new fault-diagnosis approaches specifically tailored to all-optical networks, with an objective of keeping the diagnostic capital expenditure and the diagnostic operation effort low. Instead of the aforementioned passive monitoring paradigm based on parity checks, we propose a proactive lightpath probing paradigm: optical probing signals are sent along a set of lightpaths in the network, and network state (i.e., failure pattern) is then inferred from testing results of this set of end-to-end lightpath measurements. Moreover, we assume that a subset of network nodes (up to all the nodes) is equipped with diagnostic agents - including both transmitters/receivers for probe transmission/detection and software processes for probe management to perform fault detection and localization. The design objectives of this proposed proactive probing paradigm are two folded: i) to minimize the number of lightpath probes to keep the diagnostic operational effort low, and ii) to minimize the number of diagnostic hardware to keep the diagnostic capital expenditure low.(cont.) The network fault-diagnosis problem can be mathematically modeled with a group testing-over-graphs framework. In particular, the network is abstracted as a graph in which the failure status of each node/link is modeled with a random variable (e.g. Bernoulli distribution). A probe over any path in the graph results in a value, defined as the probe syndrome, which is a function of all the random variables associated in that path. A network failure pattern is inferred through a set of probe syndromes resulting from a set of optimally chosen probes. This framework enriches the traditional group-testing problem by introducing a topological structure, and can be extended to model many other network-monitoring problems (e.g., packet delay, packet drop ratio, noise and etc) by choosing appropriate state variables. Under the group-testing-over-graphs framework with a probabilistic failure model, we initiate an information-theoretic approach to minimizing the average number of lightpath probes to identify all possible network failure patterns. Specifically, we have established an isomorphic mapping between the fault-diagnosis problem in network management and the source-coding problem in Information Theory. This mapping suggests that the minimum average number of lightpath probes required is lower bounded by the information entropy of the network state and efficient source-coding algorithms (e.g. the run-length code) can be translated into scalable fault-diagnosis schemes under some additional probe feasibility constraint. Our analytical and numerical investigations yield a guideline for designing scalable fault-diagnosis algorithms: each probe should provide approximately 1-bit of state information, and thus the total number of probes required is approximately equal to the entropy of the network state.(cont.) To address the hardware cost of diagnosis, we also developed a probabilistic analysis framework to characterize the trade-off between hardware cost (i.e., the number of nodes equipped with Tx/Rx pairs) and diagnosis capability (i.e., the probability of successful failure detection and localization). Our results suggest that, for practical situations, the hardware cost can be reduced significantly by accepting a small amount of uncertainty about the failure status.by Yonggang Wen.Ph.D

Drone Base Station Trajectory Management for Optimal Scheduling in LTE-Based Sparse Delay-Sensitive M2M Networks

Providing connectivity in areas out of reach of the cellular infrastructure is a very active area of research. This connectivity is particularly needed in case of the deployment of machine type communication devices (MTCDs) for critical purposes such as homeland security. In such applications, MTCDs are deployed in areas that are hard to reach using regular communications infrastructure while the collected data is timely critical. Drone-supported communications constitute a new trend in complementing the reach of the terrestrial communication infrastructure. In this study, drones are used as base stations to provide real-time communication services to gather critical data out of a group of MTCDs that are sparsely deployed in a marine environment. Studying different communication technologies as LTE, WiFi, LPWAN and Free-Space Optical communication (FSOC) incorporated with the drone communications was important in the first phase of this research to identify the best candidate for addressing this need. We have determined the cellular technology, and particularly LTE, to be the most suitable candidate to support such applications. In this case, an LTE base station would be mounted on the drone which will help communicate with the different MTCDs to transmit their data to the network backhaul. We then formulate the problem model mathematically and devise the trajectory planning and scheduling algorithm that decides the drone path and the resulting scheduling. Based on this formulation, we decided to compare between an Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) based technique that optimizes the drone movement among the sparsely-deployed MTCDs and a Genetic Algorithm (GA) based solution that achieves the same purpose. This optimization is based on minimizing the energy cost of the drone movement while ensuring the data transmission deadline missing is minimized. We present the results of several simulation experiments that validate the different performance aspects of the technique

Efficient communication using multiple cycles and multiple channels

Initially, the use of optical fiber in networks was to create point-to-point links. Optical paths were not altered once they were setup. This limits the ability of the network to respond to changing traffic demands. There were expensive solutions to handle dynamic traffic. One could set up multiple paths for additional traffic. Alternately, traffic that did not have a dedicated optical path needed to be received, the next hop found electronically, and then transmitted again. Current research in optical networking is looking to minimize or even eliminate electronic packet processing in the network. This will reduce the numbers of transmitters, receivers, and processing hardware needed in the network. If a signal can be kept entirely optical, new signal formats can be added to the network by only upgrading systems sending or receiving the new format. Research is currently looking at hardware designs to support electrically changing optical paths, and algorithms to route the optical paths. The topic of this work is the routing algorithms. We wish to keep cost as low as possible, while being able to recover quickly from or completely hide hardware failures. Several strategies exist to meet these expectations that involve a mix of handing routing and failure at the optical or at the electronic layer. This dissertation considers the use of cycles or rings in both establishing optical connections in response to connection requests, and electronic routing on optical cycle\u27s setup when a network is built. Load balancing is an important issue for both approaches. In this dissertation we provide heuristics and integer linear program (ILP) that can be used to find cycles in a network. We report on experiments showing the effectiveness of the heuristics. Simulations show the importance of load balancing. In the case of electronic routing, we setup cycles in the network which allow nodes on the cycle to communicate with each other. We select cycles so that they have two properties. One property is that all node pairs appear on at least one cycle. The other property is that each cycle contains a cyclical quorum. The first property allows for a network to support all-to-all communication entirely in the optical domain. The second property allows for quorum based distributed systems to send a message to an entire quorum in an all optical one-to-many connection. The use of quorums makes distributed systems efficient at tasks such as coordinating mutual exclusion or database replication. There is a need for the optical layer of the network to provide support for keeping latency of this type of communication low because as designers have scarified the benefits of using quorums in higher latency networks. Combined with light trails, cycles based on quorums requires fewer transmitter and receivers than light-paths to support all-to-all traffic

Telecommunications Networks

This book guides readers through the basics of rapidly emerging networks to more advanced concepts and future expectations of Telecommunications Networks. It identifies and examines the most pressing research issues in Telecommunications and it contains chapters written by leading researchers, academics and industry professionals. Telecommunications Networks - Current Status and Future Trends covers surveys of recent publications that investigate key areas of interest such as: IMS, eTOM, 3G/4G, optimization problems, modeling, simulation, quality of service, etc. This book, that is suitable for both PhD and master students, is organized into six sections: New Generation Networks, Quality of Services, Sensor Networks, Telecommunications, Traffic Engineering and Routing