Category Archives: Research projects

FIERRO – Future Internet: Eficiencia en las redes de altas prestaciones
(TEC2010-12250-E)
May 2011 – September 2012
Role: Technical Coordinator for Optical Communications group of UPC

The mismatches in the design objectives between the original and the future Internet avoid its widespread deployment at the expected scales. The challenges with regard to the high-performance IP (metro and core) network infrastructure involve all the layers: physical layer and switching technologies, traffic engineering, control and management, etc. The goal of this Thematic Network aims at building a platform to create synergies and close collaboration among the different Spanish groups with expertise in the Internet topic.

STRONGEST – Scalable, Tunable and Resilient Optical Networks Guaranteeing Extremely-high Speed Transport
(FP7-247674)
January 2010 – December 2012
Role: Technical Contributor

STRONGEST’s main goal is to design and demonstrate an evolutionary ultra-high capacity multilayer transport network, based on optimized integration of optical and packet nodes, and equipped with a multi-domain, multi-technology control plane, overcoming the problems of current networks that still provide limited scalability, are not cost-effective and do not properly guarantee end-to-end quality of service. STRONGEST is an industry led project; the consortium brings together major European industrial players, leading Telecom operators, Universities and Research Centres and as such, it enables the necessary synergies and creates an ideal environment for innovation and development. The European scale of the project is made necessary by the development of a new reality in which countries and federations are immensely and inextricably linked. To have a common view at European level is essential to apply the project’s outcomes. A major impact from STRONGEST will be to strengthen the position of European industry in the field of Future Internet and to reinforce European leadership in optical networks technologies. The design of a more efficient transport network with reduced cost per bit and the particular attention to energy efficiency will turn into benefit to the entire Community. Network Operators have a tough target to reduce CO2 emissions, whilst at the same time supporting significantly higher information bandwidth. They will use the results of STRONGEST, which will provide the optimum transport network architecture to achieve these targets. STRONGEST results will be exploited by Vendors to develop traffic engineering solutions running in multi-technologies and multi-domain context, and the related control plane in both legacy nodes and new optical/packet nodes. Academic Partners plan to use the STRONGEST results for further enhancement of knowledge transfer, and training and skills creation in the field of telecommunication networks, particularly in the field of optical networks.

ENGINE – Engineering Next Generation Optical Transport NEtworks
(TEC2008-02634)
January 2009 – December 2011
Role: Technical Coordinator

One of the objectives of the ENGINE (Engineering Next Generation optIcal traNsport nEtworks) project will be the upgrade of the ROADM nodes we developed in the framework of the “Red INteligente GMPLS/ASON con Integración de Nodos reconfiGurables (RINGING)” project (TEC-2005-08051-C03-02) to enable transmissions at 10 Gb/s and beyond (40-100 Gb/s). Nevertheless, the leap from 10 Gb/s to higher bit rates poses some technical problems which have to be properly investigated. Typically, when transmission speed is increased, marginal impairments such as polarization mode dispersion (PMD) become pronounced, limiting the transmission distance without signal regeneration. Therefore, another objective of the ENGINE project is also to develop and integrate in the ROADM node, modules for optical signal regeneration, chromatic (CD) and polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) compensation, in combination with wavelenght conversion (WC) techniques. On the other hand, most operators are seeing the control plane as the key factor to migrate from ring-based to meshed-based optical transport network. To migrate, thus, our experimental platform to a mesh topology, another objective of the ENGINE project will be the implementation, starting from the ROADMs, of Optical Cross Connect (OXC) nodes.In such high-capacity reconfigurable optical transport networks, the control plane must manage efficiently available wavelenghts as well as to react in case of degradation of the optical signals due to the physical impariments arisen from the propagation through the optical fibers. In the latter case, the control plane dynamically drops the degraded channels in order to regenerate the signal or to compensate the dispersion. To accomplish to this functionality, therefore, it is of critical value to efficiently monitor the accumulated physical impairments. In this context, another objective of the ENGINE project is to design and demonstrate monitoring techniques for CD and PMD. Moreover, if a 40 Gb/s (and beyond) signal has to travel through DWDM 50 GHz spaced channels, a lot of inter-symbol interference will raise. Multilevel modulation formats reduce the symbol rate and therefore alleviate the influence of impairments while advanced modulation formats together with digital signal processing-enhanced optics will make 40 Gb/s systems possible. In ENGINE, we will investigate on electronic digital signal processing as well as all-optical PMD compensation.The ENGINE project will also design and evaluate routing and wavelenght assignment algorithms which take into account the physical impairments to decide how to accomodate the connection requests triggered from the client networks (IP, SDH, Ethernet, etc.). Such algorithms will be tested over the experimental platform (arising from the RINGING project and completed accomplishing the previous objectives of ENGINE). Assuming that a network must be seen in its overall structure, which means to consider not just the transport layer but also the client networks. The ENGINE project will carry out interwoking studies aimed, firslty, to design efficient dynamic traffic grooming strategies to optimize the bandwidth utilization of the wavelenghts; and secondly, to design coordinated protection strategies between transport and client layers in order to cover a wide set of failures which can occur. In both cases, an MPLS over optical transport layer will be assumed and the designed startegies will be experimentally evaluated. Finally, the potentiality of GMPLS-based control plane to efficiently manage the network resources for hybrid Optical Circuit Switching (OCS) and Optical Burst Switching (OBS) network nodes will be investigated, since OBS networks, capable of switching smaller granularities than wavelenghts in the optical layer, are seen as the long-term solution for optical networks.

BONE – Building the Future Optical Network in Europe
(FP7-216863)
January 2008 – December 2010
Role: Technical Contributor and WP22 coordinator

The BONE-proposal builds on the foundations laid out by the e-Photon/ONe projects in the previous Framework Programme. This Network of Excellence has successfully brought together over several years the research activities within Europe in the field of Optical Networks. The BONE-project intends to validate this effort by stimulating a more intensified collaboration, exchange of researchers and building on Virtual Centres of Excellence that can serve to European industry with education & training, research tools & testlabs and pave the way to new technologies & architectures.

DICONET – Dynamic Impairment Constraint Networking for Transparent Mesh Optical Networks
(FP7-216338)
January 2008 – June 2010
Role: Technical Contributor

The DICONET project is targeting a novel approach to optical networking providing a disruptive solution for the development of the core network of the future. It is the vision and goal of our consortium to provide ultra high speed end-to-end connectivity with quality of service and high reliability through the use of optimised protocols and routing algorithms that will complement a flexible control and management plane offering flexibility for the future network infrastructure. We plan to investigate, design, implement and test new routing and wavelength assignment algorithms considering as constraints physical impairments that arise in transparent core networks. These algorithms will be incorporated into a novel dynamic network planning tool that would consider dynamic traffic characteristics, varying physical impairment and component characteristics and a reconfigurable optical layer. The use of this novel planning tool in conjunction with proper extensions to the control plane of core optical networks that will be designed, implemented and tested by our consortium will make possible to realize the vision of transparency, while offering efficient resource utilization and strict quality of service guarantees based on certain service level agreements. The combinations of the tools, algorithms and protocols that will developed by the uniquely qualified DICONET consortium together with new technologies and architectures that will be considered as enablers for the network of the future will assist in overcoming the expected long term limitations of current core network capabilities. The DICONET scope and objectives, address dynamic cross-layer network planning and optimization while considering the development of a future transport network infrastructure which ensures fail-safe network configuration and operation. Our approach will greatly contribute as a basic element in achieving resilience and transparency of the Future Internet.