9502582 Murat Azizoglu This proposal outlines a career development plan for the principal investigator with a coherent integration of research and teaching goals. The research program addresses important issues in the design of all-optical wide area networks. The education plan includes development of graduate-level courses on optical communication systems and all-optical networking, integration of communication networks into undergraduate curriculum and development of a laboratory in which the students can design, implement, and test prototype optical networks. An all-optical network is a network in which the signals remain in the optical domain from the source to the destination. This approach eliminates the speed mismatch between optical and electronic devices by avoiding optical-to-electrical signal conversion within the network. When the electronic processing is limited to the terminal nodes as prescribed, several challenging problems arise which require new and innovative approaches. Among these issues are traffic scheduling in circuit- and packet-switched networks with Wavelength Division Multiple Access, all-optical interconnection of all-optical LANs, dynamic vs. static wavelength assignment in interconnecting bridges, and architectural issues in interconnected networks. Solution to such problems must take into account optical device limitations, such as laser tuning delay and finite number of resolvable channels.
