This paper proposes a regulated transport network design algorithm for IP over a dense wavelength division multiplex (DWDM) network. When designing an IP over DWDM network, the network operator should consider not only cost-effectiveness and physical constraints such as wavelength colors and chromatic dispersion but also operational policies such as resilience, quality, stability, and operability. For considering the above polices, we propose to separate the network design algorithm based on a geographical resolution; the policy-based regulated intra-area is designed based on this resolution, and the cost-optimal inter-area is then designed separately, and finally merged. This approach does not necessarily yield a strict optimal solution, but it covers network design work done by humans, which takes a vast amount of time and requires a high skill level. For efficient geographical resolution, we also present fast graph mining algorithm, which can solve NP-hard subgraph isomorphism problem within the practical time. We prove the sufficiency of the resulting network design for the above polices by visualizing the topology, and also prove that the penalty of applying the approach is trivial.

An optical transport network is composed of optical transport systems deployed in thousands of office-buildings. As a common infrastructure to accommodate diversified communication services with drastic traffic growth, it is necessary not only to continuously convey the growing traffic but also to achieve high end-to-end communication quality and availability and provide flexible controllability in cooperation with service layer networks. To achieve high-speed and large-capacity transport systems cost-effectively, system configuration, applied devices, and the manufacturing process have recently begun to change, and the cause of failure or performance degradation has become more complex and diversified. The drastic traffic growth and pattern change of service networks increase the frequency and scale of transport-capacity increase and transport-network reconfiguration in cooperation with service networks. Therefore, drastic traffic growth affects both optical-transport-system configuration and its operational cycles. In this paper, we give an overview of the operational problems emerging in current nationwide optical transport networks, and based on trends analysis for system configuration and network-control schemes, we propose a vision of the future nationwide optical-transport-network architecture expressed using five target features.

We demonstrate a mode-locked fiber laser (MLFL) method for measuring the chromatic dispersion of long transmission fiber. In this method, device under test (DUT) is inserted in the laser cavity, and the chromatic dispersion is measured by the shift of mode-locking frequency when the lasing wavelength is changed. The experimental results of the MLFL method for a 5km-long single-mode fiber had good agreement with the conventional phase-shift method.

This paper proposes a recommendation-based bandwidth calendaring system for packet transport networks. The system provides a user-portal interface with which users can directly reserve packet transport resources. In this regard, the system recommends multi-grade (e.g., multi-price) reservation plans. By adjusting grades of plans in accordance with network resource utilization, this system provides not only reservation flexibility for users but also efficient utilization of network resources. For recommending multi-grade plans, pre-computation of resource allocation is required for every time slot. Because the number of time slots is huge, we also propose an algorithm for fast computation of resource allocation based on time-slot aggregation. Our evaluation suggests that our algorithm can produce a sub-optimal solution within quasi-real time for a large-scale network. We also show that our recommendation-based system can increase the service-provider-revenue in peaky traffic demand environments.

This paper proposes an algorithm for calculating routes that considers the include route constraint while minimizing cost. A route with include route constraint has to traverse a group of assigned nodes. The trouble when calculating a route that satisfies an include route constraint is that routes set in different sections may traverse the same link. In order to prevent this violation (overlap), we introduce an alternate route selection policy. Numerical results show that the probability of finding appropriate routes (no overlap) is more than 95% with the proposed algorithm while only 35% with the conventional algorithm.

We propose a mechanism called “optical plug and play” for constructing GMPLS networks automatically. It offers lower operation effort and fast network construction, and avoids misconfiguration. Optical plug and play architecture has its procedure, a link-up search mechanism for OXCs, network and node architectures to realize optical plug and play, and an LMP extension to exchange the information between nodes necessary for identifying adjacent nodes. We implement prototypes of both OXCs and routers that support the optical plug and play proposal. Simulations and experiments confirm its performance and feasibility.

By focusing on the recent swing to the centralized approach by the software defined network (SDN), this paper presents a novel network architecture for refactoring the current distributed Internet protocol (IP) by not only utilizing the SDN itself but also implementing its cooperation with the optical transport layer. The first IP refactoring is for flexible network topology reconfiguration: the global routing and explicit routing functions are transferred from the distributed routers to the centralized SDN. The second IP refactoring is for cost-efficient maintenance migration: we introduce a resource portable IP router that can behave as a shared backup router by cooperating with the optical transport path switching. Extensive evaluations show that our architecture makes the current IP network easier to configure and more scalable. We also validate the feasibility of our proposal.

To achieve high end-to-end availability in nationwide optical transport network across thousands of office buildings, it is important to properly make each function redundant, and execute protection switching, repair failed functions and recover redundancy to prevent multiple simultaneous failures. High redundancy leads to high system cost and high power consumption, and tight conditions for recovery leads to high maintenance cost. Therefore it is important to optimize the balance between redundancy and maintenance condition based on appropriate availability indicators. We previously proposed a resource-pool control mechanism for a nationwide optical transport network that can optimize the balance. This paper proposes an end-to-end availability evaluation scheme for a nationwide optical transport network with our mechanism, by which network operators can design the pool-resource amount of each function and the maintenance conditions for each network area properly to satisfy the end-to-end availability requirement. Although the maintenance conditions are usually discussed based on failure-recovery times, they should be discussed based on cost- or load-based volumes for this design. This paper proposes a maintenance-operation-load evaluation scheme, which derives the required number of maintenance staff members from failure-recovery times. We also discuss the design of the pool-resource amount and maintenance conditions for each network area of a nationwide network based on the proposed evaluation schemes.

This proposes a scalable QoS control scheme, called Elephant Flow Control Scheme (EFCS) for high-speed large-capacity networks; it controls congestion and provides appropriate bandwidth to normal users' flows by controlling just the elephant flows. EFCS introduces a sampling packet threshold and drops packets considering flow size. EFCS also adopts a compensation parameter to control elephant flows to an appropriate level. Numerical results show that the sampling threshold increases control accuracy by 20% while reducing the amount of memory needed for packet sampling by 60% amount of memory by packet sampling; the elephant flows are controlled as intended by the compensation parameter. As a result, EFCS provides sufficient bandwidth to normal TCP flows in a scalable manner.

We survey traffic matrix models, whose elements represent the traffic demand between source-destination pair nodes. Modeling the traffic matrix is useful for multilayer Traffic Engineering (TE) in IP optical networks. Multilayer TE techniques make the network so designed flexible and reliable. This is because it allows reconfiguration of the virtual network topology (VNT), which consists of a set of several lower-layer (optical) paths and is provided to the higher layer, in response to fluctuations (diurnal) in traffic demand. It is, therefore, important to synthetically generate traffic matrices as close to the real ones as possible to maximize the performance of multilayer TE. We compare several models and clarify their applicability to VNT design and control. We find that it is difficult in practice to make an accurate traffic matrix with conventional schemes because of the high cost for data measurement and the complicated calculations involved. To overcome these problems, we newly introduce a simplified traffic matrix model that is practical; it well mirrors real networks. Next, this paper presents our developed server, the IP Optical TE server. It performs multilayer TE in IP optical networks. We evaluate the effectiveness of multilayer TE using our developed IP Optical server and the simplified traffic matrix. We confirm that multilayer TE offers significant CAPEX savings. Similarly, we demonstrate basic traffic control in IP optical networks, and confirm the dynamic control of the network and the feasibility of the IP Optical TE server.

This paper evaluates three inter-domain redundancy path computation methods based on PCE (Path Computation Element). Some inter-domain paths carry traffic that must be assured of high quality and high reliability transfer such as telephony over IP and premium virtual private networks (VPNs). It is, therefore, important to set inter-domain redundancy paths, i.e. primary and secondary paths. The first scheme utilizes an existing protocol and the basic PCE implementation. It does not need any extension or modification. In the second scheme, PCEs make a virtual shortest path tree (VSPT) considering the candidates of primary paths that have corresponding secondary paths. The goal is to reduce blocking probability; corresponding secondary paths may be found more often after a primary path is decided; no protocol extension is necessary. In the third scheme, PCEs make a VSPT considering all candidates of primary and secondary paths. Blocking probability is further decreased since all possible candidates are located, and the sum of primary and secondary path cost is reduced by choosing the pair with minimum cost among all path pairs. Numerical evaluations show that the second and third schemes offer only a few percent reduction in blocking probability and path pair total cost, while the overheads imposed by protocol revision and increase of the amount of calculation and information to be exchanged are large. This suggests that the first scheme, the most basic and simple one, is the best choice.