NeTS/NEDG/Medium: Next-Generation
Long-Reach Broadband Access Networks
This project
is supported by the US National Science
Foundation, and is being performed at the University
of California, Davis
1
General
1.1
Award Information
Award No. CNS-0832176; Amount: $586,356 (including a
REU supplement and an international cooperation supplement); Duration:
September 1, 2008, to February 28, 2013.
1.2
Principal Investigators
1. Biswanath Mukherjee:
The PI for the project is Distinguished Professor Biswanath Mukherjee, whose
expertise is on network architecture in general, and
optical networking in particular. He is
responsible for the overall execution of this project, including serving as the
lead supervisor of the PhD students trained in this project.
2. Charles U. Martel:
The Co-PI for the project is Professor Charles U.
Martel, whose expertise is on algorithms in general with an emphasis on network
algorithms. He has been working closely
with the PI and co-advising the graduate students to ensure that the design and
analysis of the algorithms developed are sound and efficient.
1.3
Graduate Students Supported (in part) by the Award
The following PhD students at UC Davis were
supported in part by this NSF award:
1. Dr.
Huan Song worked primarily on the dynamic bandwidth allocation algorithms and
protection of Long-Reach Broadband Access Network (LR-BAN). Dr. Song finished his PhD in 2009, and he is
working as an engineer at Brocade, Inc. on the topic of broadband access
networks for fiber-to-the-X (FTTX) applications.
2. Dr. Lei Shi
worked primarily on the scheduling and energy issue of Long-Reach PON. He also worked on how to accommodate the
physical-layer issues (i.e., optical signal impairments) in the network
architecture of Long-Reach PON. He
finished his PhD in 2012, and is now working at Cisco Systems, Inc. on
datacenter technology.
3. Dr. Pulak Chowdhury
worked primarily on extending the PON coverage by also considering integrated wireless-optical
broadband access network (WOBAN) and energy-efficiency issues. He finished his PhD in March 2011; he works
for a startup company, Ennetix, Inc., incubated at
the UC Davis campus; and he continues to assist the PhD students working on
this project with their research.
4. Dr. Marilet de Andrade Jardin
(visiting from Universita Politecnica
Catalunya) worked primarily on upgrading an existing
PON seamlessly in the most cost-effective and disruption-free manner. She finished her PhD in November 2010, and is
working as a postdoctoral researcher at Politecnico di Milano, Italy, on optical access networks.
5. Dr. Avishek Nag worked on how
to accommodate the physical-layer issues (i.e., optical signal impairments) in
the network architecture of Long-Reach PON.
As part of an international research supplement of this NSF award, Dr.
Nag spent several months at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India, conducting research with our
international collaborator, Professor Debasish Datta. He finished his PhD in 2012, and he continues
to work as a postdoc on physical-layer issues in
Long-Reach PON and other topics.
6. Mr. Saigopal Thota,
PhD Candidate, is working primarily on the WOBAN
architecture, and deployment of wireless-wireline
last-mile access network in remote areas.
7. Mr. Partha Bhaumik,
PhD Candidate, has worked primarily on developing an
WOBAN prototype in our lab and the performance of applications such as
streaming IPTV on optical access networks such as 10G-EPON.
Several Undergraduate students were also supported
through a REU supplement. They assisted
the PhD students on network control protocols and GUI interface development.
1.4
Other Collaborators
Professor
Debasish Datta: Head, G. S. Sanyal School of
Telecommunications, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India.
Professor Datta is an expert on optical communication systems, namely
optical technology and system modeling, which is very complimentary to our work
on optical network architectures. This
cooperation is very important since holistic network design should take into
account sound network architectures that are based on accurate physical-layer
models. Professor Datta has been
collaborating with the PI on research problems for the past 15+ years, but this
NSF project is
the first to formalize our international research cooperation.
Dr.
Glen Kramer: Alumnus from our lab and Chief Scientist of Teknovus,
a startup company based in Petaluma CA, acquired by Broadcom; Glen plays a very
important role in the global FTTH business, as chairperson of the IEEE
standards effort for 10G EPON. Glen has
helped our understanding with the directions being taken by the FTTH / PON
industry, and he has helped us with the formulation of the seamless and
cost-effective PON upgrade problem.
Dr.
Lena Wosinska: KTH Sweden. Lena has
helped us on the PON upgrade problem also by providing us information on the
cost models and typical component costs.
Dr.
Xiuzhong (Adam) Chen: Visiting PhD Student from Beijing University of Post and
Telecommunications (BUPT), China. Dr.
Chen visited our lab for 20 months and worked on the WOBAN architecture.
Ms.
Guoying Zhang: Visiting Scientist from China Academy of Telecom Research,
China. Ms. Zhang will finish her 1-year
visit to our lab in October 2011; she worked on OFDM-based network architectures,
including their potential application in access networks.
Dr.
Sudhir Dixit: HP Labs. Dr. Dixit heads
HP Labs India, and is a long-term research collaborator of the PI. He is hosting Mr. Saigopal Thota as an intern
in his lab, and co-supervising his research on the WOBAN architecture.
2
Summary of Research Activities and Findings
2.1 General Background
One way to reduce the operational cost (OpEx) of a communication network is to lower its number of
active sites such as points of presence (PoP) and
local exchanges. Passive optical networks
(PON) can meet this goal. By eliminating
the power supply along the fiber path from the central office (CO) to end
users, which contributes a large portion of the OpEx,
and by sharing a large part of the network cost among multiple users, PON is the
most promising fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) access network, and is being deployed worldwide.
But further reduction of active sites can
lead to larger distances to be covered by the access network, leading to even
lower cost per user.
Long-Reach Broadband Access Network
(LR-BAN), also known as a Long-Reach PON (LR-PON), is a more cost-effective
solution for future broadband optical access networks. LR-BAN extends the coverage span of PONs from
the traditional 20 km range to 100 km and beyond by exploiting optical amplifier
and wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) technologies (see Fig. 1). Compared with traditional PON, LR-BAN
consolidates the multiple optical line terminals (OLTs) and central offices where
they were located, thus significantly reducing the corresponding OpEx of the network (while serving the user base through
their Optical Network Units (ONUs)). By
providing extended geographic coverage, LR-BAN combines optical access and
metro networks into an integrated system. Thus, cost savings are also achieved by
replacing the metro ring network such as Synchronous Optical Network (SONET)
with a shared optical fiber. In general,
the LR-BAN can simplify the network, reducing the number of equipment
interfaces, network elements, and even nodes.
Note our proposed “ring-and-spur” architecture for the LR-BAN in Fig. 1,
which “reuses” the “ring” structure of the metro network (and hence provides
fault tolerance for a single fiber cut) while each traditional PON segment is a
“spur” from the ring. Strictly speaking,
the LR-BAN is not passive because it has a few active elements such as optical
amplifiers and/or optical add-drop multiplexers where the CO was located
previously, but the name LR-PON (or SuperPON) is
widely used in the literature since it is derived from the PON; but we prefer
to call it LR-BAN (and not LR-PON) since it is not passive.
Fig. 1. A Long-Reach Broadband Access Network
(LR-BAN), also known as a “ring-and-spur” architecture.
Based on the promising aspects of LR-BAN,
our research is investigating methods which can utilize this network in an
effective way to serve people’s needs. With
the help of this NSF award, our studies have led to important research results,
as indicated below.
2.2
Research Contributions
Please
check our publications for detailed research contributions.
·
Performance of Access Network (EPON) in Streaming IPTV [1-2]
·
Power Management in WDM-PON [3]
·
EPoC (Ethernet PON over Coax) Architecture [4]
·
Energy Efficient Dynamic Wavelength Allocation in LR-BAN [5]
·
Energy Efficient LR-BAN with Sleep-Mode ONU [6]
·
BER-Aware Wavelength Allocation Schemes for LR-BAN with AWG [7]
·
Optical Access Networks: Exploiting Wireless Connectivity for
Robustness and a Prototype [8]
·
Strategies for Evolution of PONs [9]
·
Energy Efficient Design of LR-BAN [10]
·
Energy Efficiency Operation of a LR-BAN [11]
·
Survey of Energy Efficiency Approaches in Telecom Networks [12]
·
Energy Efficiency in WOBAN [13]
·
Optimizing the Migration to Future-Generation PONs [14]
·
A Comprehensive Survey on Long-Reach Optical Access Networks [15]
·
Multi-Thread Polling: A Dynamic Bandwidth Distribution Scheme in
Long-Reach PON [16-17]
·
Behavior-Aware User-Assignment in Long-Reach PON [18]
·
Hardware-Accelerated Protection in Long-Reach PON [19]
3
Ongoing Research Activity/Plan
Our ongoing research activity/plan includes:
(1) continuing to develop efficient algorithms to operate and upgrade
Long-Reach Broadband Access Networks (LR-BANs), where upgrade means adding more
capacity to the network seamlessly (because of increasing number of users and
their increasing bandwidth demands) without disrupting existing users, and to
make the corresponding network architecture more service-centric; (2) extending
the coverage of the optical access network not only into the network cloud
(i.e., covering the metro network) but also the wireless access domain so that
we have an extended-reach hybrid wireless-optical broadband access network
(WOBAN) with coaxial and cellular (LTE, WiMax, etc.)
front end, and develop the corresponding networking problems and challenges;
and (3) developing energy-efficient configurations and operations of the LR-BAN
as well as the WOBAN with coaxial and cellular (LTE, WiMax,
etc.) front end. These are important,
interesting, and challenging research problems.
4. References
[1] Partha Bhaumik, Abu (Sayeem) Reaz, and
Biswanath Mukherjee, “Performance of 10G-EPON in Streaming IPTV,” Proc., 6th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Networks and
Telecommunication Systems (ANTS), Bangalore, India, Dec.
2012.
[2] Abu
(Sayeem) Reaz, Daisuke Murayama, Ken-Ichi Suzuki,
Naoto Yoshimoto, Glen Kramer, and Biswanath Mukherjee, “Synthetic Traffic
Generation for Streaming Video to Model IPTV,” Proc.,
5th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Networks and Telecommunication
Systems (ANTS), Bangalore, India, Dec. 2011.
[3] Rui
Wang, Han-Hyub Lee, Sang-Soo
Lee, and Biswanath Mukherjee, “Power Management in WDM-PON,” Optical Network
Design and Modeling (ONDM) 2013 Conference, Brest, France, April 2013
(submitted).
[4] Partha
Bhaumik, Saigopal Thota, Biswanath Mukherjee, Kira Zhangli,
Jim Chen, Hesham ElBakoury, and Liming Fang, “EPON Protocol over Coax (EPoC): System Overview and Design Issues,” IEEE Communications Magazine, submitted for
publication.
[5] Lei
Shi, Sang-Soo Lee, and Biswanath Mukherjee, “Energy-Efficient
Passive Optical Network: Architectural Approaches,” IEEE Communications Magazine, accepted for publication.
[6] Lei
Shi, Sang-Soo Lee, and Biswanath Mukherjee, “Energy-Efficient
PON with Sleep-Mode ONU: Progress, Challenges and Solutions,” IEEE Network, vol. 26, no. 2, pp.
36-41, March-April 2012.
[7] Lei
Shi, Avishek Nag, Debasish Datta, and Biswanath Mukherjee, “BER-Aware
Wavelength Allocation Schemes for Long-Reach PON Employing AWG-Based Remote
Node,” Proc., 5th IEEE International Conference on
Advanced Networks and Telecommunication Systems (ANTS), Bangalore,
India, Dec. 2011.
[8] Saigopal
Thota, Partha Bhaumik, Pulak Chowdhury, Suman Sarkar, and Biswanath Mukherjee,
“Optical Access Networks: Exploiting Wireless Connectivity for Robustness and a
Prototype,” IEEE Network, submitted
for publication.
[9] Marilet
De Andrade, Glen Kramer, Lena Wosinska, Jiaja Chen,
Sebastia Sallent, and Biswanath Mukherjee, “Evaluating Strategies for Evolution
of Passive Optical Networks,” IEEE
Communications Magazine, vol. 49, no. 7, pp. 176-184, July 2011.
[10] Lei
Shi, Sang-Soo Lee, and Biswanath Mukherjee,
“Energy-Efficient Long-Reach Passive Optical Network: A Network Planning
Approach Based on User Behaviors,” IEEE
Systems Journal, Special Issue on "Broadband Access Networks", vol.
4, no. 4, pp. 449-457, Dec. 2010.
[11] Lei
Shi, Sang-Soo Lee, and Biswanath Mukherjee,
“Energy-Efficient Long-Reach Passive Optical Network: A Dynamic Wavelength
Allocation Scheme,” Proc., IEEE/OSA
Photonics in Switching Conference 2010, Monterey, CA, Aug. 2010.
[12] Yi Zhang, Pulak Chowdhury, Massimo Tornatore,
and Biswanath Mukherjee, “Energy Efficiency in Telecom Optical Networks,” IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials,
vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 441-458, Fourth Quarter, 2010.
[13] Pulak
Chowdhury, Massimo Tornatore, Suman Sarkar, and Biswanath Mukherjee, “Building
a Green Wireless-Optical Broadband Access Network (WOBAN),” IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave
Technology (JLT), vol. 28, no.
16, pp. 2219-2227, Aug. 2010.
[14] Marilet
De Andrade, Massimo Tornatore, Sebastia Sallent, and Biswanath Mukherjee,
“Optimizing the Migration to Future-Generation Passive Optical Networks (PON),”
IEEE Systems Journal, Special Issue
on "Broadband Access Networks", vol. 4, no. 4, pp. 413-423, Dec. 2010.
[15] Huan
Song, Byoung-Whi Kim, and Biswanath Mukherjee, “Long-Reach
Optical Access Networks: A Survey of Research Challenges, Demonstrations, and
Bandwidth Assignment Mechanisms,” IEEE
Communications Surveys & Tutorials, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 112-123, First
Quarter 2010.
[16] Huan
Song, Amitabha Banerjee, Byoung-Whi Kim and Biswanath
Mukherjee, “Multi-Thread Polling: A Dynamic Bandwidth Distribution Scheme in Long-Reach
PON,” IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference (GLOBECOM '07), Washington DC,
Nov. 2007.
[17] Huan
Song, Byoung-Whi Kim, and Biswanath Mukherjee, “Multi-Thread
Polling: A Dynamic Bandwidth Distribution Scheme in Long-Reach PON,” IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in
Communication, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 134-142, Feb. 2009.
[18] Lei
Shi and Huan Song, “Behavior-aware user-assignment in hybrid PON planning,” Optical Fiber Communication, 2009 (OFC 2009), San
Diego, March
2009.
[19] Huan Song, Dong-Min Seol,
and Byoung-Whi Kim, “Hardware-accelerated protection
in Long-Reach PON,” Optical Fiber Communication,
2009 (OFC 2009), San
Diego, March
2009.
5. Project Activities and Findings
Research
and Education Objectives:
The research and education activities of this
project include the creation of new knowledge and understanding on the design,
deployment, and operation of the novel Long-Reach Broadband Access Network
(LR-BAN) architecture and resource-allocation algorithms, as well as seamless
network evolution to accommodate traffic growth. The objective is to develop the next
generation of broadband access networks which are cost-effective,
energy-efficient, and easy to upgrade. We
have extended the scope to also study the performance of services (such as
streaming IPTV) over the broadband optical access network, energy-efficient
operation of the WDM-PON, etc.
Findings:
Our major findings are that the current and
emerging access networks such as Passive Optical Networks (PONs) which provide
Fiber-to-the-X (FTTX) service and the regional metro networks which are optical
rings can be operated in an integrated manner to achieve the Long-Reach
Broadband Access Network (LR-BAN) architecture.
This leads to the 'ring-and-spur' architecture which exploits the
existing metro ring infrastructure to provide fault tolerance from a fiber cut,
while each traditional PON represents a 'spur'.
Effective operation of LR-BAN can be achieved through (1)
energy-efficient network design and operation, (2) extending the access network
to the integrated wireless-wireline access network
which is also energy efficient, and (3) cost-effective, seamless, and
minimal-disruption network upgrades to accommodate network traffic growth, as
several of our publications have shown.
Cost-effective network architectures to address the above problems have
been developed and studied. Additional findings include the following: (4) the
optical access network such as 10G-EPON can support a large number of
concurrent IPTV channels with minimal buffer size at moderate rates of video
compression; (5) significant energy saving is achieved by adapting active
wavelengths to varying traffic in WDM-PON, and only minor reconfiguration and
limited ONU wavelength tunability are needed; etc.
Outreach
Activities:
Our project should have a significant impact
in demonstrating the viability of the LR-BAN as a cost-effective solution for
broadband access. At his November 4,
2009, Plenary Speech at the Asia Communications and Photonics Conference (ACP
2009) (http://www.acp-ce.org/), the CTO of
China Telecom, Leping Wei, who is well-known to the
PI, stated the importance of LR-BAN for cost-effective broadband access,
especially for emerging high-capacity applications such as video-on-demand,
IPTV, storage and grid applications. Many
other leaders in the networking industry are making similar statements.
We
continuously host visiting faculty and scientists in our laboratory from all
over the world, such as
6. Contributions
Contributions
Within Discipline:
New knowledge is being created by this
project on the design and operation of the novel Long-Reach Broadband Access
Network (LR-BAN) architecture, resource-allocation algorithms, and their
energy-efficient design and operation; integrated wireline-wireless
access network architecture; performance of services such as streaming IPTV
over optical access networks; as well as seamless network evolution to
accommodate traffic growth. We have
shown that Passive Optical Network (PON) which provides Fiber-to-the-X (FTTX)
service and the regional metro optical ring network can be integrated to
achieve the Long-Reach Broadband Access Network. We have developed an experimental prototype
of a wireless-optical broadband access network (WOBAN) on which we are
performing tests and experiments to demonstrate the various properties of our
proposed architectures, algorithms, and methods.
Contributions
to Other Disciplines:
Our research group enjoys support from industry
such as Teknovus/Broadcom, NTT, Nokia, Fujitsu, ETRI
Korea, NEC, Siemens, HP, and Huawei. Also, as broader influence of his
NSF-supported research, the PI serves or has recently served as a Member of the
Board of Directors or on the Technical Advisory Board of several companies: IPLocks, Teknovus, Intelligent
Fiber Optic Systems (IFOS), and LookAhead Decisions
Inc. (LDI). ETRI, a leading telecom research organization in Korea is collaborating
with us on the related problem of integrated wireless-wireline
integrated access network. HP Labs is
supporting the research of one of our PhD students on the WOBAN architecture
and also co-supervising this student’s research.
Contributions
to Human Resource Development:
This NSF project has supported (in part) the
research of seven PhD students (five completed, including one visiting from
Europe for a year) and three UG students.
One PhD student, Dr. Huan Song, has graduated from UC Davis, and he is
contributing to the workforce at Brocade, Inc., working on optical access
network solutions, the topic of his PhD research. Another PhD student, Dr. Pulak Chowdhury, has
also graduated from UC Davis, where he is working as a postdoc
on energy conservation in networks. The
Visiting PhD student, Dr. Marilet de Andrade defended her PhD Dissertation at
her home institution (Universita Politecnica
Catalunya), and she is now working as a psotdoc in Italy on FTTX network architectures. Dr. Lei Shi finished his PhD recently on
energy-efficient access networks and is now working at Cisco Systems, Inc. on
datacenter networks. Dr. Avishek Nag,
who also finished his PhD recently and is continuing as a postdoc
at UC Davis, spent several months at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India, conducting research with our international
collaborator, Professor Debasish Datta. PhD
student Saigopal Thota is working closely with HP Labs. Another PhD student Partha Bhaumik is working
on optical-coax access network integration.
The role of this NSF project in human resource development has been
excellent.
Contributions
to Resources for Research and Education:
A very good survey article on Long-Reach PON
has appeared in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials. Another review article on energy efficiency
in telecom networks, including access networks, appeared in IEEE Communications
Surveys and Tutorials (Fourth Quarter 2010).
Both of these surveys are very well cited. Several of our other papers on this topic are
tutorial oriented and published in IEEE Communications Magazine. The PI (Mukherjee) serves as the Series
Editor of Springer’s “Optical
Networks Book Series” which publishes a variety of books on optical
networking, including Broadband Optical Access, under his supervision and
guidance. PI Mukherjee
also Co-Guest-Edited the September 2012 IEEE Communications Magazine Special
Issue on “SERVICE INTEROPERABILITY IN ETHERNET PASSIVE OPTICAL NETWORKS (SIEPON)”,
a very important topic for guiding the optical networking industry. PI Mukherjee also
Co-Guest-Edited the May 2012 Centennial Issue (vol. 100) of the Proceedings of
the IEEE on “The
Evolution of Optical Networking”.
We have developed an experimental prototype of a wireless-optical
broadband access network (WOBAN) on which we are performing tests and
experiments to demonstrate the various properties of our proposed
architectures, algorithms, and methods.
Contributions
Beyond Science and Engineering:
Alumni from our lab – who have been primarily
trained by NSF support over the past two decades – have been gainfully employed
in various companies and universities. Nearly
a dozen of them have been women. Three
of the PI’s PhD alums – Dr. Shun Yao, Dr. Laxman Sahasrabuddhe, and Dr. Abu
Ahmed Sayeem Reaz – chose to pursue law.
The first two have finished law school and are practicing lawyers. Three other alums – Dr. Dhritiman Banerjee,
Dr. Canhui (Sam) Ou, and Dr. (Ms.) Xiaoling Qiu – are
working in the finance sector where they are utilizing their technology/telecom
background. Another
alum, Dr. Glen Kramer, was Chief Scientist of Teknovus,
a startup company based in Petaluma CA, which was recently acquired by
Broadcom, and he plays a very important role in the global FTTH business, being
the chairperson of the IEEE standards effort for 10G EPON. Ms. Guoying Zhang, Visiting Scientist in our
lab for 12 months, returned to her job at the China Academy of Telecom
Research, and she is continuing to play a very significant role in influencing
worldwide telecom standards through the ITU and the IEEE. Dr. Xiuzhong (Adam) Chen, Visiting PhD
Student in our lab for 20 months, is also working at the China Academy of
Telecom Research, and influencing worldwide telecom standards. Dr. Joonho Choi, another alumnus from our
lab, is the Director for International Liaison for the Korea Communications
Commission (KCC), equivalent to the FCC in South Korea. Thus, NSF’s support of our research program
over the past two decades is having strong impact in disciplines beyond science
and engineering.
This page is located at:
http://networks.cs.ucdavis.edu/~mukherje/lrban.htm
and is maintained by:
Biswanath Mukherjee (http://networks.cs.ucdavis.edu/~mukherje/)
Office: 3037 Kemper Hall
E-mail:
mukherje AT cs dot ucdavis
dot edu
January 12, 2013