Resource Sharing of High-Speed Optical Circuits for File Transfers

A number of efforts are underway to use optical networks to create high-speed end-to-end circuits. These circuits can be used for transfers of large files such as those generated by large-scale scientific applications. At the present time, gigabit and 10-gigabit Ethernet signals from end hosts are typically mapped onto metro-/wide-area SONET circuits using Ethernet-over-SONET (EoS) technologies. While SONET circuits are realized by configuring electronic circuit switches, extension of this concept to all-optical circuits will be straightforward when all-optical switches become commonplace. A few hero demonstrations have shown that 1-Gb/ s circuits can be configured from hosts in Europe to hosts in Canada/US to transfer files at high speeds over these circuits. Efforts targeted at these demonstrations have focused on the implementation of two pieces of software: (i) control-plane modules to provision end-to-end circuits (referred to as “user-controlled lightpaths” in [1]), and (ii) transport protocols, such as SABUL [2], Tsunami [3], and RBUDP [4] suitable for these end-to-end circuits.