Advances in the management and control of optical Internet

Given the ever increasing demand for network bandwidth, and the recent phenomenal advances in optical wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) networking technologies, a major component of the Next Generation Internet will be an Internat protocol (IP)-based optical WDM network. As IP over WDM networking technologies mature, a number of important architectural, management and control issues have surfaced. These issues need to be addressed before a true Next Generation Optical Internet can emerge. In this paper, we enumerate some of the key architectural, management and control issues and discuss corresponding approaches and advances made toward addressing these issues. We first review the different IP/WDM networking architectural models and their tradeoffs. We outline and discuss several management and control issues and corresponding approaches related to the configuration, fault, and performance management of IP over dynamic WDM networks. We present an analysis and supporting simulation results demonstrating the potential benefits of dynamic IP over WDM networks. We then discuss the issues related to IP/WDM traffic engineering in more detail, and present the approach taken in the NGI SuperNet Network Control and Management Project funded by DARPA. In particular, we motivate and present an innovative integrated traffic-engineering framework for reconfigurable IP/WDM networks. It builds on the strength of multiprotocol label switching for fine-grain IP load balancing, and on the strength of reconfigurable WDM networking for reducing the IP network’s weighted-hop-distance, and for expanding the bottleneck bandwidth.