In this paper, we address the on-demand end-to-end optical network construction problem for grid applications in new generation large-scale multi-domain wavelength switched optical networks (WSON). According to users' requests for high-performance distributed computing, groups of dedicated end-to-end lightpaths among geographically distributed grid resources can be established dynamically forming multiple-lightpath optical networks for grid applications, namely, optical grid network (OGN). To facilitate the automated OGN construction, we introduce an optical grid network infrastructure providing an integrated and self-contained OGN service to grid users with totally distributed control. In this infrastructure, for easy construction, especially in a large-scale multi-domain WSON environment, we propose an overlay approach to construct OGNs in a peer-to-peer fashion, which conceals the communication architecture of the underlying heterogeneous optical networks. In particular, we propose an adaptive construction mechanism that can develop the OGN flexibly by adapting to the dynamically changed optical network circumstance. To enable users to take the advantage of the end-to-end lightpaths of WSON directly, a wavelength-oriented end-host configuration scheme is proposed. Experimental results on a developed prototype and an optical-fibre test-bed network successfully validate the proposal.

For flexibility in supporting mobility and multihoming in edge networks and scalability of the backbone routing system, future Internet is expected to be based on the concept of ID/locator split. Heterogeneity Inclusion and Mobility Adaptation through Locator ID Separation (HIMALIS) has been designed as a generic future network architecture based on ID/locator split concept. It can natively support mobility, multihoming, scalable backbone routing and heterogeneous protocols in the network layer of the new generation network or future Internet. However, HIMALIS still lacks security functions to protect itself from various attacks during the procedures of storing, updating, and retrieving of ID/locator mappings, such as impersonation attacks. Therefore, in this paper, we address the issues of security functions design and implementation for the HIMALIS architecture. We present an integrated security scheme consisting of mapping registration and retrieval security, network access security, communication session security, and mobility security. Through the proposed scheme, the hostname to ID and locator mapping records can be securely stored and updated in two types of name registries, domain name registry and host name registry. Meanwhile, the mapping records retrieved securely from these registries are utilized for securing the network access process, communication sessions, and mobility management functions. The proposed scheme provides comprehensive protection of both control and data packets as well as the network infrastructure through an effective combination of asymmetric and symmetric cryptographic functions.

Past disasters, e.g., mega-quakes, tsunamis, have taught us that it is difficult to fully repair heavily damaged network systems in a short time. The only method for quickly restoring core communications is to start by fully utilizing the surviving network resources from different networks. However, as these networks might be built using different vendors' products (which are often incompatible with each other), the interconnection and utilization of these surviving resources are not straightforward. In this paper, we consider an all-optical multi-vendor interconnection method as an efficient reactive approach during disaster recovery. First, we introduce a disaster recovery scenario in which we use the multi-vendor interconnection approach. Second, we present two sub-problems and propose solutions: (1) network planning problem for multi-vendor interconnection-based emergency optical network construction and (2) interconnection problem for multi-vendor optical networks including both the data-plane and the control-and-management-plane. To enable the operation of multi-vendor systems, command translation middleware is developed for individual vendor-specific network control-and-management systems. Simulations are conducted to evaluate our proposal for sub-problem (1). The results reveal that multi-vendor interconnection can lead to minimum-cost network recovery. Additionally, an emergency optical network prototype is implemented on a two-vendor optical network test-bed to address sub-problem (2). Demonstrations of both the data-plane and the control-and-management-plane validate the feasibility of the multi-vendor interconnection approach in disaster recovery.

Running IoT applications on edge computing infrastructures has the benefits of low response times and efficient bandwidth usage. System verification on a testbed is required to deploy IoT applications in production environments. In a testbed, Docker containers are preferable for a smooth transition of tested application programs to production environments. In addition, the round-trip times (RTT) of Docker containers to clients must be ensured, according to the target application's response time requirements. However, in existing testbed systems, the RTTs between Docker containers and clients are not ensured. Thus, we must undergo a large amount of configuration data including RTTs between all pairs of wireless base station nodes and servers to set up a testbed environment. In this paper, we present an edge computing testbed system with simple application programming interfaces (API) for testbed users that ensures RTTs between Docker containers and clients. The proposed system automatically determines which servers to place Docker containers on according to virtual regions and the RTTs specified by the testbed users through APIs. The virtual regions provide reduced size information about the RTTs in a network. In the proposed system, the configuration data size is reduced to one divided by the number of the servers and the command arguments length is reduced to approximately one-third or less, whereas the increased system running time is 4.3s.

We study photonic packet switches to support asynchronously arriving variable-length packets. A scheduler for contention resolution is operated in electrical domain even when data street of the buffer is provided in optical domain. In this scheme, the scheduler may be a bottleneck. To compensate the gap of high-speed optical transmission and slow-speed electronic processing, we propose a multi-stage fiber delay line (FDL) buffer architecture that forms a tree structure in which each node has a block of FDLs and a scheduler. This is especially useful for output-buffer switches in which scheduling complexity is proportional to the number of ports of the packet switch. Through a newly-developed approximate analytical method, we show the optimum unit length of the fiber delay lines to decrease packet loss probability. We also show the sufficient number of FDLs in the two-stage buffer.

The forwarding speed of IP routers must grow to accommodate the skyrocketing amount of traffic on the Internet. MPLS, which relies on the high processing power of lower layers, is a solution and it is under developing. On the other hand, a WDM network has been expected as a high-speed network, but it is also called a stupid network because of lacking its traffic granularity. In order to bridge between these two layers, an IP over WDM network by a concept of MPLS has been proposed. This network has a potential to effectively use large transmission capacity provided by WDM technology. In this paper, we design IP over WDM networks that reconfigure IP routing and lightpaths each day or month. We formulate a problem that maximizes the network throughput based on integer linear programming. Through numerical examples, we show that the increase of the network throughput in IP over WDM networks is larger than that of IP networks. We also show the area where this method is applicable to the reconfigurable network.

Network virtualization and slicing technologies create opportunity for infrastructure-less virtual network operators (VNOs) to enter the market anytime and provide diverse services. Multiple VNOs compete to provide the same kinds of services to end users (EUs). VNOs lease virtual resources from the infrastructure provider (InP) and sell services to the EUs by using the leased resources. The difference between the selling and leasing is the gross profit for the VNOs. A VNO that leases resources without precise knowledge of future demand, may not consume all the leased resources through service offers to EUs. Consequently, the VNO experiences loss and resources remain unused. In order to improve resource utilization and ensure that new entrant VNOs do not face losses, proper estimation of initial resource demand is important. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian game with Cournot oligopoly model to properly estimate the optimal initial resource demands for multiple entrant competing VNOs (players) with the objective of maximizing the expected profit for each VNO. The VNOs offer the same kinds of services to EUs with different qualities (player's type), which are public information. The exact service quality with which a VNO competes in the market is private information. Therefore, a VNO assumes the type of its opponent VNOs with certain probability. We derive the Bayesian Nash equilibrium (BNE) of the presented game and evaluate numerically the effect of service qualities and prices on the expected profit and market share of the VNOs.

We have developed an automatic network configuration technology for flexible and robust network construction. In this paper, we propose a two-or-more-level hierarchical link-state routing protocol in Hierarchical QoS Link Information Protocol (HQLIP). The hierarchical routing easily scales up the network by combining and stacking configured networks. HQLIP is designed not to recompute shortest-path trees from topology information in order to achieve a high-speed convergence of forwarding information base (FIB), especially when renumbering occurs in the network. In addition, we propose a fixed-midfix renumbering (FMR) method. FMR enables an even faster convergence when HQLIP is synchronized with Hierarchical/Automatic Number Allocation (HANA). Experiments demonstrate that HQLIP incorporating FMR achieves the convergence time within one second in the network where 22 switches and 800 server terminals are placed, and is superior to Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) in terms of a convergence time. This shows that a combination of HQLIP and HANA performs stable renumbering in link-state routing protocol networks.

In this paper, we propose an end-to-end lightpath establishment method in multi-domain WDM networks. In this method, each domain contracts the provision of wavelength-state information and the number of wavelengths provided to neighbor domains. According to the contract, each source node selects the probed wavelengths, which are the candidates for backward wavelength reservation. In order to select wavelengths that are likely to be idle through the multi-domain network, the source node collects wavelength-state information from each destination node and ranks wavelengths for each destination node for giving priority. The source node selects the wavelengths with higher ranks. We propose two rank accounting methods for this purpose. Through simulation experiments, we show that the proposed rank accounting methods with the above contract provide better performance in terms of blocking probability with conventional methods, especially when intra-domain traffic is low. We present the effective number of contract wavelengths. Further, we also extend these rank accounting methods to methods that aggressively collect wavelength-state information from other destination nodes. We show further improvement of performance by the extended rank accounting methods.

Software-defined networking (SDN) technology enables us to flexibly configure switches in a network. Previously, distributed SDN control methods have been discussed to improve their scalability and robustness. Distributed placement of controllers and backing up each other enhance robustness. However, these techniques do not include an emergency measure against large-scale failures such as network separation induced by disasters. In this study, we first propose a network partitioning method to create a robust control plane (C-Plane) against large-scale failures. In our approach, networks are partitioned into multiple sub-networks based on robust topology coefficient (RTC). RTC denotes the probability that nodes in a sub-network isolate from controllers when a large-scale failure occurs. By placing a local controller onto each sub-network, 6%-10% of larger controller-switch connections will be retained after failure as compared to other approaches. Furthermore, we discuss reactive emergency reconstruction of a distributed SDN C-plane. Each node detects a disconnection to its controller. Then, C-plane will be reconstructed by isolated switches and managed by the other substitute controller. Meanwhile, our approach reconstructs C-plane when network connectivity recovers. The main and substitute controllers detect network restoration and merge their C-planes without conflict. Simulation results reveal that our proposed method recovers C-plane logical connectivity with a probability of approximately 90% when failure occurs in 100 node networks. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the convergence time of our reconstruction mechanism is proportional to the network size.

This paper proposes route advertisement policies (RAP) and an inbound traffic engineering (ITE) technique for a multihomed autonomous system (AS) employing the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and provider aggregatable (PA) addressing. The proposed RAP avail the advantage of address aggregation benefit of PA addressing. If multiple address spaces are allocated to each of the ASes that are multihomed to multiple upstream ASes, reduction of the forwarding information base (FIB) and quick convergence are achieved. However, multihoming based on PA addressing raises two issues. First, more specific address information is hidden due to address aggregation. Second, multiple allocated address spaces per AS does not provide the capability of ITE. To cope with these two limitations, we propose i) RAP to ensure connectivity among ASes with fewer routes installed in the FIB of each top-tier AS, and ii) an ITE technique to control inbound routes into multihomed ASes. Our ITE technique does not increase the RIB and FIB sizes in the Internet core. We implement the proposed RAP in an emulation environment with BGP using the Quagga software suite and our developed Hierarchical Automatic Number Allocation (HANA) protocols. We use HANA as a tool to automatically allocate hierarchical PA addresses to ASes. We confirm that with our proposed policies the FIB and RIB (routing information base) sizes in tier-1 ASes do not change with the increase of tier-3 ASes, and the number of BGP update messages exchanged is reduced by up to 69.9% from that achieved with conventional BGP RAP. We also confirmed that our proposed ITE technique, based on selective prefix advertisement, can indeed control inbound traffic into a multihomed AS employing PA addressing.

Integration of optical paths and packets in a switch is a key technique to support ultra-high-speed traffic in the future Internet. However, the question of how to efficiently allocate wavelengths for optical paths and optical packets has not been solved yet due to the lack of a systematic model to evaluate the performance of the integrated switch. In this paper, we model the operation of the integrated switch as a system of two queuing models: M/M/x/x for optical paths and M/M/1/LPS for optical packets. From the model, we find an optimal policy to dynamically allocate wavelength resources in an integrated switch. Simulation results demonstrate that our mechanism achieves better performance than other methods.

This paper presents recent progress made in the development of an optical packet and circuit integrated network. From the viewpoint of end users, this is a single network that provides both high-speed, inexpensive services and deterministic-delay, low-data-loss services according to the users' usage scenario. From the viewpoint of network service providers, this network provides large switching capacity with low energy requirements, high flexibility, and efficient resource utilization with a simple control mechanism. The network we describe here will contribute to diversification of services, enhanced functional flexibility, and efficient energy consumption, which are included in the twelve design goals of Future Networks announced by ITU-T (International Telecommunication Union - Telecommunication Standardization Sector). We examine the waveband-based network architecture of the optical packet and circuit integrated network. Use of multi-wavelength optical packet increases the switch throughput while minimizing energy consumption. A rank accounting method provides a solution to the problem of inter-domain signaling for end-to-end lightpath establishment. Moving boundary control for packet and circuit services makes for efficient resource utilization. We also describe related advanced technologies such as waveband switching, elastic lightpaths, automatic locator numbering assignment, and biologically-inspired control of optical integrated network.

Cognitive radio in network core devices, such as basestations, is being considered as a spectrum management solution for future society's communication demands. Aside from new resource allocation algorithms, efficient inter- and intra-protocol processing should be considered. In this paper, we propose an opportunistic cross layer architecture called COmmon Layer Architecture (COLA) for information exchange between arbitrary layers in New Generation Networks with network-oriented cognitive radio. COLA provides a means for faster information exchange between OSI layers by introducing abstraction at each layer and designing primitives for communication between each abstraction layer. Emulation and simulation results showed improvements, compared to conventional networks, in disrupted service (42% reduction), average delay (47% reduced) and packet drop ratio (22% reduced) in the scenario analyzed.

We experimentally demonstrate an optical packet and circuit integrated (OPCI) ring network interoperated with a wavelength-switched optical network (WSON) in a network domain. OPCI network and WSON have distinct characteristics from each other: the methods to transfer path control messages and the protocols to set up or delete the optical connections in an optical circuit switch. To interoperate the two types of optical networks, we develop a common path control-plane which can establish or release an end-to-end path by only one autonomous distributed signaling process without stitching. In the common path control-plane, we modify the signaling protocol for OCS so that we can allocate a distinct wavelength to each link on an end-to-end path and also allocate a distinct path route to each of downstream and upstream directions in a bi-directional path. We experimentally show that the common path control-plane can dynamically establish end-to-end paths over the heterogeneous network including the two types of optical networks.

Ultrahigh-speed all-optical label processing method is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. This processing method dramatically increases the label processing capability. Optical packet switch (OPS) systems and networks based on OPS nodes are applications of optical processing technologies. For the experiment, we constructed the world's first 40 Gbit/s/port OPS prototype with an all-optical label processor, optical switch, optical buffer, and electronic scheduler. Three-hop optical packet routing using OPS nodes was experimentally demonstrated with it, verifying the feasibility of OPS networks.

We present our proposed designs of optical access architecture based on WDM technology toward new-generation networks for two types of topologies: Single-star (SS) and passive-double-star (PDS). We adopt the concept of WDM-direct which links multiple wavelengths to each optical network unit (ONU). Our proposed architecture based on WDM-direct can achieve more than 10 Gbps access per ONU. Moreover, our architecture can provide not only conventional bandwidth-shared services but also bandwidth-guaranteed services requiring more than 10 Gbps bandwidth by establishing end-to-end lightpaths directly to each ONU, and thus meet high requirements of QoS in new-generation networks. Firstly, we show our proposed designs of SS-type architecture, and experimentally demonstrate the system. We confirm that the optical line terminal (OLT) successfully switches between packet/lightpath data transmissions for each ONU. In addition, we measure and evaluate optical power loss in upstream/downstream transmissions between the OLT and ONUs. Secondly, we show our proposed designs of PDS-type architecture, and theoretically analyze and evaluate the bit-rate capacity of the system.

The scalability of routing protocol has been considered as a key issue in large-scaled wavelength routed networks. Hierarchical routing scales well by yielding enormous reductions in routing table length, but it also increases path length. This increased path length in wavelength-routed networks leads to increased blocking probability because longer paths tend to have less free wavelength channels. However, if the routes assigned to longer paths have greater wavelength resources, we can expect that the blocking probability will not increase. In this paper, we propose a distributed node-clustering method that maximizes the number of lightpaths between nodes. The key idea behind our method is to construct node-clusters that have much greater wavelength resources from the ingress border nodes to the egress border nodes, which increases the wavelength resources on the routes of lightpaths between nodes. We evaluate the blocking probability for lightpath requests and the maximum table length in simulation experiments. We find that the method we propose significantly reduces the table length, while the blocking probability is almost the same as that without clustering.

Limitations are found in the recent Internet because a lot of functions and protocols are patched to the original suite of layered protocols without considering global optimization. This reveals that end-to-end argument in the original Internet was neither sufficient for the current societal network and nor for a sustainable network of the future. In this position paper, we present design guidelines for a future network, which we call the New Generation Network, which provides the inclusion of diverse human requirements, reliable connection between the real-world and virtual network space, and promotion of social potentiality for human emergence. The guidelines consist of the crystal synthesis, the reality connection, and the sustainable & evolutional guidelines.