Online Permutation Routing in Partitioned Optical Passive Star Networks

This paper establishes the state of the art in both deterministic and randomized online permutation routing in the POPS network. Indeed, we show that any permutation can be routed online on a POPS network either with $O(\frac{d}{g}\log g)$ deterministic slots, or, with high probability, with $5c\lceil d/g\rceil+o(d/g)+O(\log\log g)$ randomized slots, where constant $c=\exp (1+e^{-1})\approx 3.927$. When $d=\Theta(g)$, that we claim to be the "interesting" case, the randomized algorithm is exponentially faster than any other algorithm in the literature, both deterministic and randomized ones. This is true in practice as well. Indeed, experiments show that it outperforms its rivals even starting from as small a network as a POPS(2,2), and the gap grows exponentially with the size of the network. We can also show that, under proper hypothesis, no deterministic algorithm can asymptotically match its performance

Dynamic Optical Networks for Data Centres and Media Production

This thesis explores all-optical networks for data centres, with a particular focus on network designs for live media production. A design for an all-optical data centre network is presented, with experimental verification of the feasibility of the network data plane. The design uses fast tunable (< 200 ns) lasers and coherent receivers across a passive optical star coupler core, forming a network capable of reaching over 1000 nodes. Experimental transmission of 25 Gb/s data across the network core, with combined wavelength switching and time division multiplexing (WS-TDM), is demonstrated. Enhancements to laser tuning time via current pre-emphasis are discussed, including experimental demonstration of fast wavelength switching (< 35 ns) of a single laser between all combinations of 96 wavelengths spaced at 50 GHz over a range wider than the optical C-band. Methods of increasing the overall network throughput by using a higher complexity modulation format are also described, along with designs for line codes to enable pulse amplitude modulation across the WS-TDM network core. The construction of an optical star coupler network core is investigated, by evaluating methods of constructing large star couplers from smaller optical coupler components. By using optical circuit switches to rearrange star coupler connectivity, the network can be partitioned, creating independent reserves of bandwidth and resulting in increased overall network throughput. Several topologies for constructing a star from optical couplers are compared, and algorithms for optimum construction methods are presented. All of the designs target strict criteria for the flexible and dynamic creation of multicast groups, which will enable future live media production workflows in data centres. The data throughput performance of the network designs is simulated under synthetic and practical media production traffic scenarios, showing improved throughput when reconfigurable star couplers are used compared to a single large star. An energy consumption evaluation shows reduced network power consumption compared to incumbent and other proposed data centre network technologies

Optical flow switched networks

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2009.Includes bibliographical references (p. 253-279).In the four decades since optical fiber was introduced as a communications medium, optical networking has revolutionized the telecommunications landscape. It has enabled the Internet as we know it today, and is central to the realization of Network-Centric Warfare in the defense world. Sustained exponential growth in communications bandwidth demand, however, is requiring that the nexus of innovation in optical networking continue, in order to ensure cost-effective communications in the future. In this thesis, we present Optical Flow Switching (OFS) as a key enabler of scalable future optical networks. The general idea behind OFS-agile, end-to-end, all-optical connections-is decades old, if not as old as the field of optical networking itself. However, owing to the absence of an application for it, OFS remained an underdeveloped idea-bereft of how it could be implemented, how well it would perform, and how much it would cost relative to other architectures. The contributions of this thesis are in providing partial answers to these three broad questions. With respect to implementation, we address the physical layer design of OFS in the metro-area and access, and develop sensible scheduling algorithms for OFS communication. Our performance study comprises a comparative capacity analysis for the wide-area, as well as an analytical approximation of the throughput-delay tradeoff offered by OFS for inter-MAN communication. Lastly, with regard to the economics of OFS, we employ an approximate capital expenditure model, which enables a throughput-cost comparison of OFS with other prominent candidate architectures. Our conclusions point to the fact that OFS offers significant advantage over other architectures in economic scalability.(cont.) In particular, for sufficiently heavy traffic, OFS handles large transactions at far lower cost than other optical network architectures. In light of the increasing importance of large transactions in both commercial and defense networks, we conclude that OFS may be crucial to the future viability of optical networking.by Guy E. Weichenberg.Ph.D

Intelligent Sensor Networks

In the last decade, wireless or wired sensor networks have attracted much attention. However, most designs target general sensor network issues including protocol stack (routing, MAC, etc.) and security issues. This book focuses on the close integration of sensing, networking, and smart signal processing via machine learning. Based on their world-class research, the authors present the fundamentals of intelligent sensor networks. They cover sensing and sampling, distributed signal processing, and intelligent signal learning. In addition, they present cutting-edge research results from leading experts

Topics in access, storage, and sensor networks

In the first part of this dissertation, Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS) and IEEE 802.3ah Ethernet Passive Optical Network (ETON), two access networking standards, are studied. We study the impact of two parameters of the DOCSIS protocol and derive the probability of message collision in the 802.3ah device discovery scheme. We survey existing bandwidth allocation schemes for EPONs, derive the average grant size in one such scheme, and study the performance of the shortest-job-first heuristic. In the second part of this dissertation, we study networks of mobile sensors. We make progress towards an architecture for disconnected collections of mobile sensors. We propose a new design abstraction called tours which facilitates the combination of mobility and communication into a single design primitive and enables the system of sensors to reorganize into desirable topologies alter failures. We also initiate a study of computation in mobile sensor networks. We study the relationship between two distributed computational models of mobile sensor networks: population protocols and self-similar functions. We define the notion of a self-similar predicate and show when it is computable by a population protocol. Transition graphs of population protocols lead its to the consideration of graph powers. We consider the direct product of graphs and its new variant which we call the lexicographic direct product (or the clique product). We show that invariants concerning transposable walks in direct graph powers and transposable independent sets in graph families generated by the lexicographic direct product are uncomputable. The last part of this dissertation makes contributions to the area of storage systems. We propose a sequential access detect ion and prefetching scheme and a dynamic cache sizing scheme for large storage systems. We evaluate the cache sizing scheme theoretically and through simulations. We compute the expected hit ratio of our and competing schemes and bound the expected size of our dynamic cache sufficient to obtain an optimal hit ratio. We also develop a stand-alone simulator for studying our proposed scheme and integrate it with an empirically validated disk simulator

Design, Analysis and Computation in Wireless and Optical Networks

abstract: In the realm of network science, many topics can be abstracted as graph problems, such as routing, connectivity enhancement, resource/frequency allocation and so on. Though most of them are NP-hard to solve, heuristics as well as approximation algorithms are proposed to achieve reasonably good results. Accordingly, this dissertation studies graph related problems encountered in real applications. Two problems studied in this dissertation are derived from wireless network, two more problems studied are under scenarios of FIWI and optical network, one more problem is in Radio- Frequency Identification (RFID) domain and the last problem is inspired by satellite deployment. The objective of most of relay nodes placement problems, is to place the fewest number of relay nodes in the deployment area so that the network, formed by the sensors and the relay nodes, is connected. Under the fixed budget scenario, the expense involved in procuring the minimum number of relay nodes to make the network connected, may exceed the budget. In this dissertation, we study a family of problems whose goal is to design a network with “maximal connectedness” or “minimal disconnectedness”, subject to a fixed budget constraint. Apart from “connectivity”, we also study relay node problem in which degree constraint is considered. The balance of reducing the degree of the network while maximizing communication forms the basis of our d-degree minimum arrangement(d-MA) problem. In this dissertation, we look at several approaches to solving the generalized d-MA problem where we embed a graph onto a subgraph of a given degree. In recent years, considerable research has been conducted on optical and FIWI networks. Utilizing a recently proposed concept “candidate trees” in optical network, this dissertation studies counting problem on complete graphs. Closed form expressions are given for certain cases and a polynomial counting algorithm for general cases is also presented. Routing plays a major role in FiWi networks. Accordingly to a novel path length metric which emphasizes on “heaviest edge”, this dissertation proposes a polynomial algorithm on single path computation. NP-completeness proof as well as approximation algorithm are presented for multi-path routing. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology is extensively used at present for identification and tracking of a multitude of objects. In many configurations, simultaneous activation of two readers may cause a “reader collision” when tags are present in the intersection of the sensing ranges of both readers. This dissertation ad- dresses slotted time access for Readers and tries to provide a collision-free scheduling scheme while minimizing total reading time. Finally, this dissertation studies a monitoring problem on the surface of the earth for significant environmental, social/political and extreme events using satellites as sensors. It is assumed that the impact of a significant event spills into neighboring regions and there will be corresponding indicators. Careful deployment of sensors, utilizing “Identifying Codes”, can ensure that even though the number of deployed sensors is fewer than the number of regions, it may be possible to uniquely identify the region where the event has taken place.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201

Joint optimization of topology, switching, routing and wavelength assignment

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 279-285).To provide end users with economic access to high bandwidth, the architecture of the next generation metropolitan area networks (MANs) needs to be judiciously designed from the cost perspective. In addition to a low initial capital investment, the ultimate goal is to design networks that exhibit excellent scalability - a decreasing cost-per-node-per-unit-traffic as user number and transaction size increase. As an effort to achieve this goal, in this thesis we search for the scalable network architectures over the solution space that embodies the key aspects of optical networks: fiber connection topology, switching architecture selection and resource dimensioning, routing and wavelength assignment (RWA). Due to the inter-related nature of these design elements, we intended to solve the design problem jointly in the optimization process in order to achieve over-all good performance. To evaluate how the cost drives architectural tradeoffs, an analytical approach is taken in most parts of the thesis by first focusing on networks with symmetric and well defined structures (i.e., regular networks) and symmetric traffic patterns (i.e., all-to-all uniform traffic), which are fair representations that give us suggestions of trends, etc.(cont.) We starts with a examination of various measures of regular topologies. The average minimum hop distance plays a crucial role in evaluating the efficiency of network architecture. From the perspective of designing optical networks, the amount of switching resources used at nodes is proportional to the average minimum hop distance. Thus a smaller average minimum hop distance translates into a lower fraction of pass-through traffic and less switching resources required. Next, a first-order cost model is set up and an optimization problem is formulated for the purpose of characterizing the tradeoffs between fiber and switching resources. Via convex optimization techniques, the joint optimization problem is solved analytically for (static) uniform traffic and symmetric networks. Two classes of regular graphs - Generalized Moore Graphs and A-nearest Neighbors Graphs - are identified to yield lower and upper cost bounds, respectively. The investigation of the cost scalability further demonstrates the advantage of the Generalized Moore Graphs as benchmark topologies: with linear switching cost structure, the minimal normalized cost per unit traffic decreases with increasing network size for the Generalized Moore Graphs and their relatives.(cont.) In comparison, for less efficient fiber topologies (e.g., A-nearest Neighbors) and switching cost structures (e.g., quadratic cost), the minimal normalized cost per unit traffic plateaus or even increases with increasing network size. The study also reveals other attractive properties of Generalized Moore Graphs in conjunction with minimum hop routing - the aggregate network load is evenly distributed over each fiber. Thus, Generalized Moore Graphs also require the minimum number of wavelengths to support a given uniform traffic demand. Further more, the theoretical works on the Generalized Moore Graphs and their close relatives are extended to study more realistic design scenarios in two aspects. One aspect addresses the irregular topologies and (static) non-uniform traffic, for which the results of Generalized Moore networks are used to provide useful estimates of network cost, and are thus offering good references for cost-efficient optical networks. The other aspect deals with network design under random demands. Two optimization formulations that incorporate the traffic variability are presented.(cont.) The results show that as physical architecture, Generalized Moore Graphs are most robust (in cost) to the demand uncertainties. Analytical results also provided design guidelines on how optimum dimensioning, network connectivity, and network costs vary as functions of risk aversion, service level requirements, and probability distributions of demands.by Kyle Chi Guan.Ph.D