Category: News

Dr. Suresh Subramaniam has received a three-year $368,000 National Science Foundation grant for the project “Resilience in Next-Generation Intelligent Optical Networks.” The world’s telecom infrastructure is dominated by fiber optics because of optical fiber’s tremendous bandwidth, and huge investments continue to be made in that infrastructure. However, as the insatiable demand for bandwidth grows, the network becomes more and more complex and harder to manage and protect. Network designers are, therefore, increasingly turning toward “disaggregated” optical nodes, which are composed of simple building blocks of essential functions. This project aims to equip the network infrastructure with resilience against failures, both small-scale, due to component or system degradation, and large-scale, due to disasters, for example. Resilience schemes at multiple granularity levels, ranging from component-level to network-level to service-level, will be developed. This research is a joint project between Dr. Subramaniam and collaborators from Nagoya University and Kagawa University in Japan, who will be funded separately by NICT, Japan's research and funding agency for telecom research.

Dr. Suresh Subramaniam and his collaborator at San Jose State University have received a three-year, $496,000 National Science Foundation grant titled “Design and Provisioning for Inter-Datacenter Multi-granular Flexible Optical Networks.” GW's share of the award is $300,000. Large-scale data centers are constantly evolving to meet the ever-increasing demand for cloud computing services. As the scale of the data continues to increase and latencies become more and more important, providers are turning to geo-distributed datacenters to serve customers at the most proximal datacenter location. These new requirements pose a serious challenge to network operators, who have to come up with a flexible and reliable solution while considering the operational benefits that can potentially result. Recent advances in agile and flexible optical networking have made Flexible Optical Networks (FONs) a promising candidate for meeting the dynamic and heterogeneous connection demands between datacenters. Nevertheless, as networks scale in capacity, fine-grained switching of slots becomes prohibitively expensive; a flexible wavebanding optical cross-connect (OXC) has been recently proposed to offset the large increase in cost. The goal of this project is to develop design and provisioning strategies for multi-granular inter-datacenter FONs. The results of the project will inform the design of agile and flexible optical networks for inter-datacenter networking.