The explosive growth in bandwidth represented by advances in optical communication and networking technologies has underpinned the increasing reach and reliability of the Internet in the last two decades. However, the potential impact of increasingly sophisticated recent advances in optical technology, such as rapid switching and elastic wavelengths, have not yet been realized. The main cause of this is that such technology, while possible to integrate into the data plane of planetary networking, is difficult to accommodate in the current planning, management, and control strategies.
In this project, we will work hand-in-hand with collaborating researchers from NICT, Japan, who are working to realize a novel technology of hybrid optical packet/circuit switching. Such a technology could be immensely useful to large transport network operators, but there are no existing algorithms that can easily determine how a provider can provision their resources between the circuit and packet possibilities on an ongoing dynamic basis.
We take a novel approach to this problem, utilizing the concept of a "choice marketplace" that embodies sophisticated rendezvous semantics between customer and provider, and allows them to cooperatively guide network resource provisioning to dynamically fulfill network objectives such as maximizing performance received by network traffic. Our approach provides social benefit by balancing of various objectives, such as network utilization, latency, and the increasingly important metric of energy expenditure in the network. Our work will provide an early prototype of how customers can shop for network transport services in a competitive marketplace, allowing provider ecosystems to emerge for mutual advantage. The project will integrate research and prototyping activities into education, and utilize the US-Japan collaboration to provide broadening of students' educational horizons.
