Dr. Subramaniam and colleagues receive $496K NSF grant

Dr. Suresh Subramaniam and his collaborator at San Jose State University have received a three-year, $496,000 National Science Foundation grant titled “Design and Provisioning for Inter-Datacenter Multi-granular Flexible Optical Networks.”  GW's share of the award is $300,000.  Large-scale data centers are constantly evolving to meet the ever-increasing demand for cloud computing services.  As the scale of the data continues to increase and latencies become more and more important, providers are turning to geo-distributed datacenters to serve customers at the most proximal datacenter location.  These new requirements pose a serious challenge to network operators, who have to come up with a flexible and reliable solution while considering the operational benefits that can potentially result.  Recent advances in agile and flexible optical networking have made Flexible Optical Networks (FONs) a promising candidate for meeting the dynamic and heterogeneous connection demands between datacenters.  Nevertheless, as networks scale in capacity, fine-grained switching of slots becomes prohibitively expensive; a flexible wavebanding optical cross-connect (OXC) has been recently proposed to offset the large increase in cost.  The goal of this project is to develop design and provisioning strategies for multi-granular inter-datacenter FONs.  The results of the project will inform the design of agile and flexible optical networks for inter-datacenter networking.