The career development plan outlined in this proposal focuses on the integration of the research and teaching objectives of the principal investigator. The research project addresses a number of important issues in the design and interconnection of optical networks. The ultimate goal of the proposed work is to develop viable solutions for a seamless nationwide all-optical network infrastructure. The educational component includes development of graduate-level courses on all-optical networking and on internetwork architectures and protocols, integration of topics on lightwave technology in existing graduate and undergraduate introductory network courses, and active involvement of undergraduate students in network projects. In an all-optical network using wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), information is transmitted as optical signals throughout the path from source to destination. By using multiple concurrent channels, each on a different wavelength, WDM has the potential to exploit the enormous information-carrying capacity of fiber and deliver an aggregate throughput that is several orders of magnitude higher than it is possible today. Given the installed base of optical fiber, and the maturing of optical component technologies, it appears that current network technologies will eventually evolve to an all-optical infrastructure. The deployment of such an infrastructure will cater to the needs of emerging bandwidth-intensive applications. However, large scale interconnection of optical networks raises a number of fundamental and challenging problems that require novel and innovative solutions. As part of his career development plan, the principal investigator proposes to address a number of these issues, including multiple access in broadcast-and-select WDM networks, traffic scheduling of unicast and multicast traffic, interconnection of photonic local area networks, architectural issues in wavelength routed backbone networks, dist ributed control, and issues related to the interaction among subnetwork and backbone protocols. Our work is expected to further our understanding of the characteristics of optical networks, and to provide insight on how to overcome some of the limitations of the technology. The objective is to produce an analytical framework that will make it possible to evaluate alternative architectures and protocols.
