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

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 Engineering in G-MPLS networks with QoS guarantees

In this paper a new Traffic Engineering (TE) scheme to efficiently route sub-wavelength requests with different QoS requirements is proposed for G-MPLS networks. In most previous studies on TE based on dynamic traffic grooming, the objectives were to minimize the rejection probability by respecting the constraints of the optical node architecture, but without considering service differentiation. In practice, some high-priority (HP) connections can instead be characterized by specific constraints on the maximum tolerable end-to-end delay and packet-loss ratio. The proposed solution consists of a distributed two-stage scheme: each time a new request arrives, an on-line dynamic grooming scheme finds a route which fulfills the QoS requirements. If a HP request is blocked at the ingress router, a preemption algorithm is executed locally in order to create room for this traffic. The proposed preemption mechanism minimizes the network disruption, both in term of number of rerouted low-priority connections and new set-up lightpaths, and the signaling complexity. Extensive simulation experiments are performed to demonstrate the efficiency of our scheme

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)

Framework for waveband switching in multigranular optical networks: part I-multigranular cross-connect architectures

Optical networks using wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) are the foremost solution to the ever-increasing traffic in the Internet backbone. Rapid advances in WDM technology will enable each fiber to carry hundreds or even a thousand wavelengths (using dense-WDM, or DWDM, and ultra-DWDM) of traffic. This, coupled with worldwide fiber deployment, will bring about a tremendous increase in the size of the optical cross-connects, i.e., the number of ports of the wavelength switching elements. Waveband switching (WBS), wherein wavelengths are grouped into bands and switched as a single entity, can reduce the cost and control complexity of switching nodes by minimizing the port count. This paper presents a detailed study on recent advances and open research issues in WBS networks. In this study, we investigate in detail the architecture for various WBS cross-connects and compare them in terms of the number of ports and complexity and also in terms of how flexible they are in adjusting to dynamic traffic. We outline various techniques for grouping wavelengths into bands for the purpose of WBS and show how traditional wavelength routing is different from waveband routing and why techniques developed for wavelength-routed networks (WRNs) cannot be simply applied to WBS networks. We also outline how traffic grooming of subwavelength traffic can be done in WBS networks. In part II of this study [Cao , submitted to J. Opt. Netw.], we study the effect of wavelength conversion on the performance of WBS networks with reconfigurable MG-OXCs. We present an algorithm for waveband grouping in wavelength-convertible networks and evaluate its performance. We also investigate issues related to survivability in WBS networks and show how waveband and wavelength conversion can be used to recover from failures in WBS networks