CSC News

April 08, 2008

DARPA Award to Support Optical Networks Research

Professors George Rouskas and Doug Reeves of the NC State Department of Computer Science and Gigi Karmous-Edwards, a research scientist with MCNC, have been awarded $250,279 by DARPA to fund a collaborative research proposal titled “Edge Reconfigurable Optical Networks (ERONs) for High-Performance Applications.” 

The award will run from April 2, 2008 through October 2, 2008.

Research Abstract - Many existing and emerging classes of high-end applications involve complex, intensive computations on large data sets.  These applications often require coordination of resources that exist at several geographically dispersed sites. 

Such applications impose three fundamental requirements in terms of accessing the relevant distributed resources: high bandwidth connectivity, the ability to dynamically and jointly allocate heterogeneous types of resources, and the ability to perform in-advance, as well as fast (sub-seconds to minutes) on-the-fly, reservation and setup of network connections.

To enable these high-end applications, network resources must be scheduled (i.e., reserved and released) based on end-user requirements and on short timescales. Today, however, setting up high-bandwidth connections on demand is nearly impossible due to a fundamental lack of infrastructure capabilities to support the automatic, scheduled, and rapid establishment of end-to-end lightpaths.

To bridge the gap between the current practice, which is to set up expensive, dedicated, and static lightpath connections, and the distant future vision of inexpensive access to dynamically switched end-to-end lightpaths, we propose a medium term solution.  This solution is termed edge-reconfigurable optical networks, or ERONs.

The objective of an ERON is to enable the sharing of expensive high bandwidth network resources among multiple users and applications that require occasional, yet scheduled access to these resources.

For more information on Dr. George Rouskas, click here.

For more information on Dr. Doug Reeves, click here.

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