Collaborative Research: CNS Core: MEDIUM: RUI: Optics Without Borders

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The Internet is critical to every aspect of life, connecting businesses, organizations, and people domestically and internationally, providing access to vast amounts of information, and enabling advanced services like telework, telehealth and tele-education. Today’s Internet network infrastructure consists of routers produced by multiple equipment vendors that collaboratively work together to deliver connectivity between any two points in the world. This interoperable network architecture is both critical to an efficient, effective Internet and a factor in enabling the cost-per-bit of information to decrease even as overall average bandwidth-per-connection has increased dramatically. However, the currently deployed fiber optic networks that underlie the Internet do not share this ‘open’ network architecture, requiring expensive equipment at network boundaries. By extending the open networking approach to the optical layer so that optical signals can successfully traverse different fiber spans, networks and equipment vendor domains, it is expected that we can significantly increase the pace of innovation, decrease costs and improve the nation's cyberinfrastructure.This project focuses on two key contributions towards an open optical networking (OON) architecture to enable seamless optical connections across multiple domains: (a) the definition, investigation, and experimental validation of new telemetric techniques based on coherent transceivers, whose objective is to improve the ability of network controllers to accurately estimate the transmission performance of an optical signal in a multi-vendor and multi-domain fiber network infrastructure; and (b) the design, development, validation, and dissemination of an open-source real-time fiber network infrastructure emulator that takes advantage of the new telemetric technology to demonstrate the scalability and efficiency of both existing and newly developed Software Defined Network (SDN) controllers, while taking into account the interaction across multiple layers (fiber, Ethernet, IP) and changing characteristics of the fiber network infrastructure due to mechanical stress, aging, and other relevant factors. The emulator mimics the behavior of a fiber network and its optical equipment, thus enabling researchers to conduct experimental work on OON without the burden of acquiring, setting up, and maintaining expensive optical equipment. It is also useful as a planning tool for new experimental testbed deployments or connections that span more than one domain.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.