NeTS JUNO: Collaborative Research: ACTION: Applications Coordinating with Transport, IP, and Optical Networks

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Today's Internet is significantly over-provisioned for a number of reasons, e.g., to absorb traffic bursts, to handle the extra (rerouted) load when failures occur, and for long-term traffic growth without frequent upgrades in the field. This overprovisioning adds significant capital costs to the Internet. The ACTION project enables adaptation of the Internet to changing needs and demands by dynamically adjusting its "optical highway" capacities based on network resource utilization. The project name ACTION stands for "Applications Coordinate through Transport Interfaces with Optical Networks," implying that the capacity of the Internet optical highways is a time-adjustable commodity, which can be intelligently controlled by the applications via specially designed interfaces. For example, part of the optical spectrum can be freed on highways with low traffic volume and either reassigned to other highways where needed or switched off to conserve energy. Such flexible highways are achieved by combining WDM (Wavelength Division Multiplexing) Flexible Grid technology in the metro-core with DSCM (Digital Subcarrier Multiplexing) technology in the campus/access. The ACTION research activities will culminate in a final demonstration on the Japan Gigabit Network-extreme (JGN-X) test-bed. The ACTION project will actively engage undergraduate students in Senior Thesis and Design Projects, recruit women and under-represented minorities by leveraging the UVA Center for Diversity in Engineering and the UTDallas long-standing relationship with CONACYT (National Council for Science and Technology of Mexico). Findings, documents, links to publications and software will be disseminated through a wiki-based Web site. All instructional materials developed will be made available at TeachEngineering.com.