Ph.D. Student Position at INRS-ÉMT, Montréal

Peer-to-peer Driven Control of Optical WDM-UpgradedAccess and Metro Networks

Background:
Optical fiber is the medium of choice to provide high-capacity networks to the ever increasingnumber of users and bandwidth-hungry applications. Network operators currently push thedeployment of optical technologies from backbone networks towards the network peripherycloser to the residential and business users in order to mitigate the bandwidth bottlenecks atthe access (first mile) and metropolitan levels of today’s networks.

Recently, optical access and metro networks have attracted much attention both from industryand academia. In particular, the emerging standards IEEE 803.ah Ethernet Passive OpticalNetwork (EPON) and IEEE 802.17 Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) are promising opticalnetwork solutions to the first mile and metro bottlenecks by uniquely combining the benefitsof Ethernet and SONET/SDH technologies. Both EPON and RPR deploy only a singlewavelength channel on their fiber infrastructure, thus leaving the vast capacity of optical fiberunused. Future access and metro optical networks need to provide more capacity to the everincreasingly higher-speed clients by tapping into the vast amount of bandwidth of optical fiberby means of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM). To this end, both EPON and RPR areexpected to be WDM upgraded.

Research Topic:An exciting avenue for future research is the integration and control of WDM EPON andWDM RPR networks. Beside the design of WDM node structures and all-optical networkarchitectures particular attention has to be paid to the access control of multiple wavelengthchannels and its performance evaluation for various traffic patterns. Apart from legacy voicetraffic future access and metro WDM networks must be able to efficiently support so-calledpeer-to-peer traffic, which is currently the predominant traffic type in the Internet. The peerto-peer application driven control of access/metro WDM networks is expected to gainconsiderable attention in the near term.