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RESEARCH AREA: Optical Networks & Services

Area Leader Prof. Piero Castoldi




The area of optical networks and services is concerned with aspects of provisioning, resilience, management and control of telecommunica¬tion networks from a high-level point of view, as perceived by the traffic engineer, the network element manufacturer, and the network operator according to a top-down perspective. Looking at end users and service providers, research is also focussed on application service issues. The type of transport in the data plane is mainly optical, considering also pos¬sible electrical and wireless segments in the metro/access part of the network. Many complementary topics are the subject of investigation and are listed below:

  • Algorithmic aspects of provisioning, resilience and QoS support in mul¬tilayer networks. This activity covers the theoretical aspects of resource provisioning, reliability and QoS support.
  • GMPLS protocol suite extensions. This activity includes an implemen¬tation-oriented improvement of the protocols belonging to the GMPLS protocol suite, with particular emphasis on physical-impairment aware GMPLS.
  • Multilayer traffic engineering. This activity includes all the aspects of traffic engineering in a multilayer and multidomain environment, including the experimental validation of the previous two topics.
  • Green networking. This recently initiated activity envi¬sions a search for low power consumption design of networks in all segments.
  • Optical node architecture. This topic covers the hardware design and packet scheduling strategies for all-optical nodes for achieving ultra-high packet throughput.
  • Wired/wireless network integration. This topic spans from reliability in wireless mesh network, to the problem of the integration of wired and wireless mesh networks from the point of view of data plane, OAM and control plane.
  • Service Platform Architectures. The aim of this activity is to enable the application to trigger network services in metro/core networks and to extend the QoS signalling as an end-to-end commodity.