Optical control plane: theory and algorithms

In this thesis we propose a novel way to achieve global network information dissemination in which some wavelengths are reserved exclusively for global control information exchange. We study the routing and wavelength assignment problem for the special communication pattern of non-blocking all-to-all broadcast in WDM optical networks. We provide efficient solutions to reduce the number of wavelengths needed for non-blocking all-to-all broadcast, in the absence of wavelength converters, for network information dissemination. We adopt an approach in which we consider all nodes to be tap-and-continue capable thus studying lighttrees rather than lightpaths. To the best of our knowledge, this thesis is the first to consider “tap-and-continue” capable nodes in the context of conflict-free all-to-all broadcast. The problem of all to-all broadcast using individual lightpaths has been proven to be an NP-complete problem [6]. We provide optimal RWA solutions for conflict-free all-to-all broadcast for some particular cases of regular topologies, namely the ring, the torus and the hypercube. We make an important contribution on hypercube decomposition into edge-disjoint structures. We also present near-optimal polynomial-time solutions for the general case of arbitrary topologies. Furthermore, we apply for the first time the “cactus” representation of all minimum edge-cuts of graphs with arbitrary topologies to the problem of all-to-all broadcast in optical networks. Using this representation recursively we obtain near-optimal results for the number of wavelengths needed by the non-blocking all-to-all broadcast. The second part of this thesis focuses on the more practical case of multi-hop RWA for non- blocking all-to-all broadcast in the presence of Optical-Electrical-Optical conversion. We propose two simple but efficient multi-hop RWA models. In addition to reducing the number of wavelengths we also concentrate on reducing the number of optical receivers, another important optical resource. We analyze these models on the ring and the hypercube, as special cases of regular topologies. Lastly, we develop a good upper-bound on the number of wavelengths in the case of non-blocking multi-hop all-to-all broadcast on networks with arbitrary topologies and offer a heuristic algorithm to achieve it. We propose a novel network partitioning method based on “virtual perfect matching” for use in the RWA heuristic algorithm

IP multicast over WDM networks

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

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

Resource allocation and performance analysis problems in optical networks

Optical networks pose a rich variety of new design and performance analysis problems. Typically, the static design problems belong to the field of combinatorial optimisation, whereas decision-making and performance analysis problems are best treated using appropriate stochastic models. This dissertation focuses on certain issues in resource allocation and performance evaluation of backbone wavelength-routed (WR) networks and metropolitan area optical burst switching (OBS) networks. The first two parts of the thesis consider heuristic algorithms for the static routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) and logical topology design (LTD) problems that arise in the context of WR networks. In a static RWA problem, one is asked to establish a given set of lightpaths (or light trees) in an optical WR network with given constraints, where the objective often is to minimise the number of wavelength channels required. In LTD problem, the number of wavelength channels is given and one is asked to decide on the set of lightpaths so that, for instance, the mean sojourn time of packets travelling at the logical layer is minimised. In the thesis, several heuristic algorithms for both the RWA and LTD problems are described and numerical results are presented. The third part of the thesis studies the dynamic control problem where connection requests, i.e. lightpath requests, arrive according to a certain traffic pattern and the task is to establish one lightpath at a time in the WR optical network so that the expected revenue is maximised or the expected cost is minimised. Typically, the goal of optimisation is to minimise some infinite time horizon cost function, such as the blocking probability. In this thesis, the dynamic RWA problem is studied in the framework of Markov decision processes (MDP). An algorithmic approach is proposed by which any given heuristic algorithm can be improved by applying the so-called first policy iteration (FPI) step of the MDP theory. Relative costs of states needed in FPI are estimated by on-the-fly simulations. The computational burden of the approach is alleviated by introducing the importance sampling (IS) technique with FPI, for which an adaptive algorithm is proposed for adjusting the optimal IS parameters at the same time as data are collected for the decision-making analysis. The last part of the thesis considers OBS networks, which represent an intermediate step towards full optical packet switching networks. In OBS networks, the data are transferred using optical bursts consisting of several IP packets going to the same destination. On the route of the burst, temporary reservations are made only for the time during which the burst is transmitted. This thesis focuses on fairness issues in OBS networks. It is demonstrated that fairness can be improved by using fibre delay lines together with Just-Enough-Time protocol (JET). Furthermore, by choosing the routes in an appropriate way one can also reach a satisfactory level of fairness and, at the same time, lower the overall blocking probability. Possible scheduling policies for metropolitan area OBS ring networks are also studied.reviewe

Network Load Based Analysis of Blocking Probability in WDM Network

Arrangement of expansible quality of service (QoS) attestation on wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) is a crucial and perplexing problem of the cutting threshold internet. From the essential performance parameters the blocking probability (BP) computation is a QoS adept in WDM network. This method of BP computation in a wavelength routed optical network (WRON) is presented, keep in mind that blocking-probability computation used only to a network that is remain same where, traffic demands arrive, wait for a convinced time, and finally dispense, so that the total traffic intensity for a time is same i.e. remain unchanged. For an active optical network (AON), despite the fact we lag behind that traffic loads will reach, wait for a fixed time, and afterword dispense, same we taken into account that the normalized intensity of traffic existing of a network is going to increase gradually with time as the number of users receiving on the typical network and also growth in their networking essentials towards large bandwidth uses, extended holding time uses, etc. Hence, blocking probability computation try not to use meanwhile traffic is not fixed. Otherwise, we have to take into account of "exhaustion probability," having a time duration, lastly we anticipated that the network is to run into capacity exhaust. The realization traffic distribution of network performs to achieve an exact blocking performance. So the BP for each available link having a shortest path or having a large weight in a sorted order taken into account, in the network the connection and node relation for the traffic between each link is dependant. The usefulness of this technique is to be applicable in low load region, exact, faster compare to other techniques. Furthermore, this technique is more useful to calculate the estimation of blocking probability per node as well as for the network

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

Management and Control of Scalable and Resilient Next-Generation Optical Networks

Two research topics in next-generation optical networks with wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) technologies were investigated: (1) scalability of network management and control, and (2) resilience/reliability of networks upon faults and attacks. In scalable network management, the scalability of management information for inter-domain light-path assessment was studied. The light-path assessment was formulated as a decision problem based on decision theory and probabilistic graphical models. It was found that partial information available can provide the desired performance, i.e., a small percentage of erroneous decisions can be traded off to achieve a large saving in the amount of management information. In network resilience under malicious attacks, the resilience of all-optical networks under in-band crosstalk attacks was investigated with probabilistic graphical models. Graphical models provide an explicit view of the spatial dependencies in attack propagation, as well as computationally efficient approaches, e.g., sum-product algorithm, for studying network resilience. With the proposed cross-layer model of attack propagation, key factors that affect the resilience of the network from the physical layer and the network layer were identified. In addition, analytical results on network resilience were obtained for typical topologies including ring, star, and mesh-torus networks. In network performance upon failures, traffic-based network reliability was systematically studied. First a uniform deterministic traffic at the network layer was adopted to analyze the impacts of network topology, failure dependency, and failure protection on network reliability. Then a random network layer traffic model with Poisson arrivals was applied to further investigate the effect of network layer traffic distributions on network reliability. Finally, asymptotic results of network reliability metrics with respect to arrival rate were obtained for typical network topologies under heavy load regime. The main contributions of the thesis include: (1) fundamental understandings of scalable management and resilience of next-generation optical networks with WDM technologies; and (2) the innovative application of probabilistic graphical models, an emerging approach in machine learning, to the research of communication networks.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Ji, Chuanyi; Committee Member: Chang, Gee-Kung; Committee Member: McLaughlin, Steven; Committee Member: Ralph, Stephen; Committee Member: Zegura, Elle

Investigation of the tolerance of wavelength-routed optical networks to traffic load variations.

This thesis focuses on the performance of circuit-switched wavelength-routed optical network with unpredictable traffic pattern variations. This characteristic of optical networks is termed traffic forecast tolerance. First, the increasing volume and heterogeneous nature of data and voice traffic is discussed. The challenges in designing robust optical networks to handle unpredictable traffic statistics are described. Other work relating to the same research issues are discussed. A general methodology to quantify the traffic forecast tolerance of optical networks is presented. A traffic model is proposed to simulate dynamic, non-uniform loads, and used to test wavelength-routed optical networks considering numerous network topologies. The number of wavelengths required and the effect of the routing and wavelength allocation algorithm are investigated. A new method of quantifying the network tolerance is proposed, based on the calculation of the increase in the standard deviation of the blocking probabilities with increasing traffic load non-uniformity. The performance of different networks are calculated and compared. The relationship between physical features of the network topology and traffic forecast tolerance is investigated. A large number of randomly connected networks with different sizes were assessed. It is shown that the average lightpath length and the number of wavelengths required for full interconnection of the nodes in static operation both exhibit a strong correlation with the network tolerance, regardless of the degree of load non-uniformity. Finally, the impact of wavelength conversion on network tolerance is investigated. Wavelength conversion significantly increases the robustness of optical networks to unpredictable traffic variations. In particular, two sparse wavelength conversion schemes are compared and discussed: distributed wavelength conversion and localized wavelength conversion. It is found that the distributed wavelength conversion scheme outperforms localized wavelength conversion scheme, both with uniform loading and in terms of the network tolerance. The results described in this thesis can be used for the analysis and design of reliable WDM optical networks that are robust to future traffic demand variations