Category Archives: Research

SunsetSustainable Network Infrastructure Enabling the Future Digital Society

January 2015 – June 2018
TEC2014-59583-C2-2-R

The ICT eco-system has been rapidly and dramatically changing in the last several years. Emerging cloud services, mobile and social network technologies are creating new communication patterns, requiring architectural changes to the underlying networks in order to enable scalable growth in traffic volume, while supporting a high level of dynamic connectivity where applications and application components are frequently provisioned, released, and moved around. SUNSET project focuses on overcoming the existing bottlenecks of current architectural solutions to provide a successful support of the future Digital Society, paving the way to new-coming cloud ICT services as well as enhancing a sustainable use of these services by mature economic sectors, improving this way their competitiveness through cloud ICT technologies. More specifically, SUNSET proposes a novel architecture including all network segments (access, metro, core) and data centre network, empowered by advanced optical technologies and Software Defined Networking (SDN), capable of sustaining the growing resource and operational demands of next generation networks.

SUNSET aims to achieve several objectives as:

  • Researching and developing modulation techniques and signal processing techniques for a 10x improvement in transmission data rate in metro-access networks using low cost commercial devices.
  • Developing SDN-enabled nodes implementing elastic wavelength and space multiplexing as well as to implement SDN controllers able to manage legacy optical equipment.
  • Designing and developing SDN-based orchestration frameworks, SDN-enabled monitoring capabilities, resource optimization algorithms, and investigating future SDN technologies.
  • In the long term, SUNSET also investigates further reducing power consumption and enhancing performance at larger scales higher factors of 100 to 1000 in medium-long terms, by hybrid photonic and wireless technologies towards Data-Centres-in-a-Box, supported by new nanostructured materials.

Definitely, the SUNSET project brings together a combination of expertise and resources to deliver novel scalable and future-proof network overall infrastructure solutions.

Lightness Low latency and high throughput dynamic network infrastructures for high performance datacentre interconnects

November 2012 – October 2015
FP7-318606

The main objective of the LIGHTNESS project is the design, implementation and experimental evaluation of a high-performance network infrastructure for data centres, where innovative photonic switching and transmission solutions are deployed. Harnessing the power of optics will enable data centres to effectively cope with the unprecedented demand growth to be faced in the near future, which will be driven by the increasing popularity of computing and storage server-side applications in the society. Indeed, the deployment of optical transmission systems leveraging Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) allows the transmission of more than a hundred of wavelength channels operating at 10, 40, 100 Gb/s and beyond. This effectively results in “unlimited” bandwidth capacities of multiple Terabit/s per fibre link, which can be efficiently utilized through next-generation all-optical switching paradigms like Optical Circuit Switching (OCS) or Optical Packet Switching (OPS). In this context, LIGHTNESS will join efforts towards the demonstration of a high-performance all-optical hybrid data plane for data centre networks, combining both OCS and OPS equipment to implement transport services tailored to the specific applications’ throughput and latency requirements. To this goal, an OPS node suitable for intra- data centre connectivity services will be developed and prototyped during the project, together with an enhanced Top of the Rack (TOR) switch seamlessly connecting servers in each rack to the hybrid OCS/OPS inter-cluster network. As an additional achievement of LIGHTNESS, the OCS/OPS inter-cluster network will be empowered with a network control plane able to dynamically provision flexible connectivity services in the hybrid OCS/OPS data centre network. Such a control plane will also be developed and prototyped for integration in the final LIGHTNESS demo throughout the project.

Domino Experimental UpdateLess Evolutive Routing

October 2010 – June 2014
FP7-258307

The main objective of the EULER exploratory research project is to investigate new routing paradigms so as to design, develop, and validate experimentally a distributed and dynamic routing scheme suitable for the future Internet and its evolution. The resulting routing scheme(s) is/are intended to address the fundamental limits of current stretch-1 shortest-path routing in terms of routing table scalability but also topology and policy dynamics (perform efficiently under dynamic network conditions). Therefore, this project will investigate trade-offs between routing table size (to enhance scalability), routing scheme stretch (to ensure routing quality) and communication cost (to efficiently and timely react to various failures). The project will develop appropriate tools to evaluate the performance of the proposed routing schemes on large-scale topologies (order of 10k nodes). Prototype of the routing protocols as well as their functional validation and performance benchmarking on the iLAB experimental facility and/or virtual experimental facilities such as PlanetLab/OneLab will allow validating under realistic conditions the overall behaviour of the proposed routing schemes.

Domino Design and optimization of multi-layer green optical networks

January 2011 – December 2014
TEC2010-18522

The DOMINO project aims at designing novel architecture, algorithms and protocols solutions fulfilling the energy efficiency and awareness requirements of future multi-layer green optical networks. DOMINO leverages the capacities of ultra high dynamic multi-layer optical networks to decrease the ICTs carbon footprint, and relies on five innovative concepts: a thorough analysis of the energetic issues in networks, including the benefits of using novel sub-wavelength switching devices and extending the energy-oriented model to multi-domain scenario; novel network planning strategies accounting for energy, cost and performance metrics; specialised dynamic routing algorithms where multiple constraints such as energy consumption, resource utilisation, and signal quality are optimised; energy-oriented operations and protocols in the network control plane to support the designed strategies and algorithms; dedicated techno-economic studies to evaluate the overall impact the novel concepts have on current network infrastructure and provide a possible migration roadmap.

ICT Express, Elsevier, ISSN: 2405-9595, SCI index (2023): 4.1.
Since October 2024.

Computer Networks and Communications, Universal Wiser Publisher, ISSN: 2972-4619.
Since June 2022.

Applied Sciences, MDPI, ISSN: 2076-3417, SCI index (2023): 2.5.
Since October 2019.

Journal of High Speed Networks, IOS press, ISSN: 0926-6801.
Since July 2012.

Photonic Network Communications, Springer Nature, ISSN: 1572-8188, SCI index (2023): 1.8.
From September 2019 to November 2024.

Scientific World Journal, Hindawi Publishing Corporation, ISSN: 1537-744X, SCI index (2012): 1.730.
From September 2013 to August 2016.

Cost804 Energy efficiency in large scale distributed systems

23 January 2009 – 4 May 2013
ICT Action IC0804

This COST Action will propose realistic energy-efficient alternate solutions to share IT distributed resources. While much effort is nowadays put into hardware specific solutions to lower energy consumptions, the need for a complementary approach is necessary at the distributed system level, i.e. middleware, network and applications. The Action will characterize the energy consumption and energy efficiencies of distributed applications. Then based on the current hardware adaptation possibilities and innovative algorithms it will propose adaptive and alternative approaches taking into account the energy saving dimension of the problem. The Action will characterize the trade-off between energy savings and functional and non-functional parameters, including the economic dimension.

Strongest Scalable Tunable and Resilient Optical Networks Guaranteeing Extremely-high Speed Transport

January 2010 – December 2012
FP7-247674

STRONGEST leverages on the definition of innovative architectures for developing a scalable, resilient and cost-effective transport network, offering ultra-high capacity to the end users in the broadband society of the future. The new architectures will take into account the evolution of the access network technologies, in order to ensure transparent core-access integration, but the studies carried out by the project will focus mainly on the metro and core areas, because these are the part of the network where the main scalability issues are foreseen in the next years.

Fierro Future Internet: Eficiencia en las redes de altas prestaciones

May 2011 – September 2012
TEC2010-12250-E

FIERRO es una Red Temática que agrupa a 21 Universidades, Centros de Investigación y empresas españolas, que investigan en los retos tecnológicos que la Internet del Futuro (Future Internet) plantea en la red IP de altas prestaciones. Con esto nos referimos a las redes de comunicaciones de alta velocidad, por ejemplo con agregados de tráfico de 10 Gbps en adelante.

Pervasive and Convergent Networking

January 2010 – December 2010
TEC2009-13252

The main goal of this project is to contribute in the design of technologies for a converged and pervasive Internet. The project aims to push new services and protocols into the network considering them as coupled processes. To do that, we will take into consideration four of the most relevant aspects that are currently of interest of the research community in this field. These are the optical transport, the ubiquitous connectivity, the application of a traffic analysis and monitoring techniques for the management and control of the network, and the security of communications. In order to address these aspects the project is structured in the following research activities: Architectures for the Pervasive Networking, Traffic monitoring and analysis, Converged Optical Networking Infrastructure, and Digital Identity and Electronic Signature, which coincide with of the different subareas of expertise of the Broadband Communication Systems research group that traditionally have exploited participating in separated projects.