Multilayer Protection with Availability Guarantees in Optical WDM Networks

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Logical topology design for IP rerouting: ASONs versus static OTNs

IP-based backbone networks are gradually moving to a network model consisting of high-speed routers that are flexibly interconnected by a mesh of light paths set up by an optical transport network that consists of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) links and optical cross-connects. In such a model, the generalized MPLS protocol suite could provide the IP centric control plane component that will be used to deliver rapid and dynamic circuit provisioning of end-to-end optical light paths between the routers. This is called an automatic switched optical (transport) network (ASON). An ASON enables reconfiguration of the logical IP topology by setting up and tearing down light paths. This allows to up- or downgrade link capacities during a router failure to the capacities needed by the new routing of the affected traffic. Such survivability against (single) IP router failures is cost-effective, as capacity to the IP layer can be provided flexibly when necessary. We present and investigate a logical topology optimization problem that minimizes the total amount or cost of the needed resources (interfaces, wavelengths, WDM line-systems, amplifiers, etc.) in both the IP and the optical layer. A novel optimization aspect in this problem is the possibility, as a result of the ASON, to reuse the physical resources (like interface cards and WDM line-systems) over the different network states (the failure-free and all the router failure scenarios). We devised a simple optimization strategy to investigate the cost of the ASON approach and compare it with other schemes that survive single router failures

Traffic grooming and wavelength conversion in optical networks

Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) using wavelength routing has emerged as the dominant technology for use in wide area and metropolitan area networks. Traffic demands in networks today are characterized by dynamic, heterogeneous flows. While each wavelength has transmission capacity at gigabit per second rates, users require connections at rates that are lower than the full wavelength capacity. In this thesis, we explore network design and operation methodologies to improve the network utilization and blocking performance of wavelength routing networks which employ a layered architecture with electronic and optical switching. First we provide an introduction to first generation SONET/SDH networks and wavelength routing networks, which employ optical crossconnects. We explain the need and role of wavelength conversion in optical networks and present an algorithm to optimally place wavelength conversion devices at the network nodes so as to optimize blocking performance. Our algorithm offers significant savings in computation time when compared to the exhaustive method.;To make the network viable and cost-effective, it must be able to offer sub-wavelength services and be able to pack these services efficiently onto wavelengths. The act of multiplexing, demultiplexing and switching of sub-wavelength services onto wavelengths is defined as traffic grooming. Constrained grooming networks perform grooming only at the network edge. Sparse grooming networks perform grooming at the network edge and the core. We study and compare the effect of traffic grooming on blocking performance in such networks through simulations and analyses. We also study the issue of capacity fairness in such networks and develop a connection admission control (CAC) algorithm to improve the fairness among connections with different capacities. We finally address the issues involved in dynamic routing and wavelength assignment in survivable WDM grooming networks. We develop two schemes for grooming primary and backup traffic streams onto wavelengths: Mixed Primary-Backup Grooming Policy (MGP) and Segregated Primary-Backup Grooming Policy (SGP). MGP is useful in topologies such as ring, characterized by low connectivity and high load correlation and SGP is useful in topologies, such as mesh-torus, with good connectivity and a significant amount of traffic switching and mixing at the nodes

Design and provisioning of WDM networks for traffic grooming

Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) is the most viable technique for utilizing the enormous amounts of bandwidth inherently available in optical fibers. However, the bandwidth offered by a single wavelength in WDM networks is on the order of tens of Gigabits per second, while most of the applications\u27 bandwidth requirements are still subwavelength. Therefore, cost-effective design and provisioning of WDM networks require that traffic from different sessions share bandwidth of a single wavelength by employing electronic multiplexing at higher layers. This is known as traffic grooming. Optical networks supporting traffic grooming are usually designed in a way such that the cost of the higher layer equipment used to support a given traffic matrix is reduced. In this thesis, we propose a number of optimal and heuristic solutions for the design and provisioning of optical networks for traffic grooming with an objective of network cost reduction. In doing so, we address several practical issues. Specifically, we address the design and provisioning of WDM networks on unidirectional and bidirectional rings for arbitrary unicast traffic grooming, and on mesh topologies for arbitrary multipoint traffic grooming. In multipoint traffic grooming, we address both multicast and many-to-one traffic grooming problems. We provide a unified frame work for optimal and approximate network dimensioning and channel provisioning for the generic multicast traffic grooming problem, as well as some variants of the problem. For many-to-one traffic grooming we propose optimal as well as heuristic solutions. Optimal formulations which are inherently non-linear are mapped to an optimal linear formulation. In the heuristic solutions, we employ different problem specific search strategies to explore the solution space. We provide a number of experimental results to show the efficacy of our proposed techniques for the traffic grooming problem in WDM networks

Resilient network dimensioning for optical grid/clouds using relocation

In this paper we address the problem of dimensioning infrastructure, comprising both network and server resources, for large-scale decentralized distributed systems such as grids or clouds. We will provide an overview of our work in this area, and in particular focus on how to design the resulting grid/cloud to be resilient against network link and/or server site failures. To this end, we will exploit relocation: under failure conditions, a request may be sent to an alternate destination than the one under failure-free conditions. We will provide a comprehensive overview of related work in this area, and focus in some detail on our own most recent work. The latter comprises a case study where traffic has a known origin, but we assume a degree of freedom as to where its end up being processed, which is typically the case for e. g., grid applications of the bag-of-tasks (BoT) type or for providing cloud services. In particular, we will provide in this paper a new integer linear programming (ILP) formulation to solve the resilient grid/cloud dimensioning problem using failure-dependent backup routes. Our algorithm will simultaneously decide on server and network capacity. We find that in the anycast routing problem we address, the benefit of using failure-dependent (FD) rerouting is limited compared to failure-independent (FID) backup routing. We confirm our earlier findings in terms of network capacity savings achieved by relocation compared to not exploiting relocation (order of 6-10% in the current case studies)

Virtualisation and resource allocation in MECEnabled metro optical networks

The appearance of new network services and the ever-increasing network traffic and number of connected devices will push the evolution of current communication networks towards the Future Internet. In the area of optical networks, wavelength routed optical networks (WRONs) are evolving to elastic optical networks (EONs) in which, thanks to the use of OFDM or Nyquist WDM, it is possible to create super-channels with custom-size bandwidth. The basic element in these networks is the lightpath, i.e., all-optical circuits between two network nodes. The establishment of lightpaths requires the selection of the route that they will follow and the portion of the spectrum to be used in order to carry the requested traffic from the source to the destination node. That problem is known as the routing and spectrum assignment (RSA) problem, and new algorithms must be proposed to address this design problem. Some early studies on elastic optical networks studied gridless scenarios, in which a slice of spectrum of variable size is assigned to a request. However, the most common approach to the spectrum allocation is to divide the spectrum into slots of fixed width and allocate multiple, consecutive spectrum slots to each lightpath, depending on the requested bandwidth. Moreover, EONs also allow the proposal of more flexible routing and spectrum assignment techniques, like the split-spectrum approach in which the request is divided into multiple "sub-lightpaths". In this thesis, four RSA algorithms are proposed combining two different levels of flexibility with the well-known k-shortest paths and first fit heuristics. After comparing the performance of those methods, a novel spectrum assignment technique, Best Gap, is proposed to overcome the inefficiencies emerged when combining the first fit heuristic with highly flexible networks. A simulation study is presented to demonstrate that, thanks to the use of Best Gap, EONs can exploit the network flexibility and reduce the blocking ratio. On the other hand, operators must face profound architectural changes to increase the adaptability and flexibility of networks and ease their management. Thanks to the use of network function virtualisation (NFV), the necessary network functions that must be applied to offer a service can be deployed as virtual appliances hosted by commodity servers, which can be located in data centres, network nodes or even end-user premises. The appearance of new computation and networking paradigms, like multi-access edge computing (MEC), may facilitate the adaptation of communication networks to the new demands. Furthermore, the use of MEC technology will enable the possibility of installing those virtual network functions (VNFs) not only at data centres (DCs) and central offices (COs), traditional hosts of VFNs, but also at the edge nodes of the network. Since data processing is performed closer to the enduser, the latency associated to each service connection request can be reduced. MEC nodes will be usually connected between them and with the DCs and COs by optical networks. In such a scenario, deploying a network service requires completing two phases: the VNF-placement, i.e., deciding the number and location of VNFs, and the VNF-chaining, i.e., connecting the VNFs that the traffic associated to a service must transverse in order to establish the connection. In the chaining process, not only the existence of VNFs with available processing capacity, but the availability of network resources must be taken into account to avoid the rejection of the connection request. Taking into consideration that the backhaul of this scenario will be usually based on WRONs or EONs, it is necessary to design the virtual topology (i.e., the set of lightpaths established in the networks) in order to transport the tra c from one node to another. The process of designing the virtual topology includes deciding the number of connections or lightpaths, allocating them a route and spectral resources, and finally grooming the traffic into the created lightpaths. Lastly, a failure in the equipment of a node in an NFV environment can cause the disruption of the SCs traversing the node. This can cause the loss of huge amounts of data and affect thousands of end-users. In consequence, it is key to provide the network with faultmanagement techniques able to guarantee the resilience of the established connections when a node fails. For the mentioned reasons, it is necessary to design orchestration algorithms which solve the VNF-placement, chaining and network resource allocation problems in 5G networks with optical backhaul. Moreover, some versions of those algorithms must also implements protection techniques to guarantee the resilience system in case of failure. This thesis makes contribution in that line. Firstly, a genetic algorithm is proposed to solve the VNF-placement and VNF-chaining problems in a 5G network with optical backhaul based on star topology: GASM (genetic algorithm for effective service mapping). Then, we propose a modification of that algorithm in order to be applied to dynamic scenarios in which the reconfiguration of the planning is allowed. Furthermore, we enhanced the modified algorithm to include a learning step, with the objective of improving the performance of the algorithm. In this thesis, we also propose an algorithm to solve not only the VNF-placement and VNF-chaining problems but also the design of the virtual topology, considering that a WRON is deployed as the backhaul network connecting MEC nodes and CO. Moreover, a version including individual VNF protection against node failure has been also proposed and the effect of using shared/dedicated and end-to-end SC/individual VNF protection schemes are also analysed. Finally, a new algorithm that solves the VNF-placement and chaining problems and the virtual topology design implementing a new chaining technique is also proposed. Its corresponding versions implementing individual VNF protection are also presented. Furthermore, since the method works with any type of WDM mesh topologies, a technoeconomic study is presented to compare the effect of using different network topologies in both the network performance and cost.Departamento de Teoría de la Señal y Comunicaciones e Ingeniería TelemáticaDoctorado en Tecnologías de la Información y las Telecomunicacione

Optimal Regenerator Placement for Dedicated Path Protection in Impairment-Aware WDM Networks

Building resilient Wavelength Division Multiplexed (WDM) optical networks is an important area of research. This thesis deals with the design of reliable WDM networks where physical layer impairments are taken into account. This research addresses both the regenerator placement problem (RPP) and the routing with regenerator problem (RRP) in impairment-aware WDM networks, using dedicated path protection. Both the problems have been tackled using linear Integer formulations which can be implemented, using a solver such as the CPLEX. For solving RPP, two solutions have been proposed - i) a formulation that gives optimal solutions which works only for small networks, and ii) a highly effective heuristic which given an optimal solution in 97.5 to 99% of cases for networks having a size up to 60 nodes

Towards Scalable Cost-Effective Service and Survivability Provisioning in Ultra High Speed Networks

Optical transport networks based on wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) are considered to be the most appropriate choice for future Internet backbone. On the other hand, future DOE networks are expected to have the ability to dynamically provision on-demand survivable services to suit the needs of various high performance scientific applications and remote collaboration. Since a failure in aWDMnetwork such as a cable cut may result in a tremendous amount of data loss, efficient protection of data transport in WDM networks is therefore essential. As the backbone network is moving towards GMPLS/WDM optical networks, the unique requirement to support DOE’s science mission results in challenging issues that are not directly addressed by existing networking techniques and methodologies. The objectives of this project were to develop cost effective protection and restoration mechanisms based on dedicated path, shared path, preconfigured cycle (p-cycle), and so on, to deal with single failure, dual failure, and shared risk link group (SRLG) failure, under different traffic and resource requirement models; to devise efficient service provisioning algorithms that deal with application specific network resource requirements for both unicast and multicast; to study various aspects of traffic grooming in WDM ring and mesh networks to derive cost effective solutions while meeting application resource and QoS requirements; to design various diverse routing and multi-constrained routing algorithms, considering different traffic models and failure models, for protection and restoration, as well as for service provisioning; to propose and study new optical burst switched architectures and mechanisms for effectively supporting dynamic services; and to integrate research with graduate and undergraduate education. All objectives have been successfully met. This report summarizes the major accomplishments of this project. The impact of the project manifests in many aspects: First, the project addressed many essential problems that arisen in current and future WDM optical networks, and provided a host of innovative solutions though there was no invention or patent filing. This project resulted in more than 2 dozens publications in major journals and conferences (including papers in IEEE Transactions and journals, as well as a book chapter). Our publications have been cited by many peer researchers. In particular, one of our conference papers was nominated for the best paper award of IEEE/Create-Net Broadnets (International Conference on Broadband Communications, Networks, and Systems) 2006. Second, the results and solutions of this project were well received by DOE Labs where presentations were given by the PI. We hope to continue the collaboration with DOE Labs in the future. Third, the project was the first to propose and extensively study multicast traffic grooming, new traffic models such as sliding scheduled traffic model and scheduled traffic model. Our research has sparkled a flurry of recent studies and publications by the research community in these areas. Fourth, the project has benefited a diverse population of students by motivating, engaging, enhancing their learning and skills. The project has been conducted in a manner conducive to the training of students both at graduate and undergraduate levels. As a result, one Ph.D., Dr. Abdur Billah, was graduated. Another Ph.D. student, Tianjian Li, will graduate in January 2007. In addition, four MS students were graduated. One undergraduate student, Jeffrey Alan Shininger, completed his university honors project. Fifth, thanks to the support of this ECPI project, the PI has obtained additional funding from the National Science Foundation, the Air Force Research Lab, and other sources. A few other proposals are pending. Finally, this project has also significantly impacted the curricula and resulted in the enhancement of courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels, therefore strengthening the bond between research and education