http://www.cs.unibo.it/~montesi/CBD/Articoli/SurvyBigData2.pdf

Data-intensive applications, challenges, techniques and technologies: A survey on Big Data

The Grid 2: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure

To support bursty traffic on the Internet (and especially WWW) efficiently, optical burst switching (OBS) is proposed as a way to streamline both protocols and hardware in building the future gener...

Optical burst switching (OBS) - a new paradigm for an optical Internet

This work presents an estimation of the global electricity usage that can be ascribed to Communication Technology (CT) between 2010 and 2030. The scope is three scenarios for use and production of consumer devices, communication networks and data centers. Three different scenarios, best, expected, and worst, are set up, which include annual numbers of sold devices, data traffic and electricity intensities/efficiencies. The most significant trend, regardless of scenario, is that the proportion of use-stage electricity by consumer devices will decrease and will be transferred to the networks and data centers. Still, it seems like wireless access networks will not be the main driver for electricity use. The analysis shows that for the worst-case scenario, CT could use as much as 51% of global electricity in 2030. This will happen if not enough improvement in electricity efficiency of wireless access networks and fixed access networks/data centers is possible. However, until 2030, globally-generated renewable electricity is likely to exceed the electricity demand of all networks and data centers. Nevertheless, the present investigation suggests, for the worst-case scenario, that CT electricity usage could contribute up to 23% of the globally released greenhouse gas emissions in 2030.

/pdf/on-global-electricity-usage-of-communication-technology-3s4ck5m1i1.pdf

On Global Electricity Usage of Communication Technology: Trends to 2030

The current fast-growing Internet traffic is demanding more and more network capacity every day. The concept of wavelength-division multiplexing has provided us an opportunity to multiply network capacity. Current optical switching technologies allow us to rapidly deliver the enormous bandwidth of WDM networks. Photonic packet switching offers high-speed, data rate/format transparency, and configurability, which are some of the important characteristics needed in future networks supporting different forms of data. In this article we present some of the critical issues involved in designing and implementing all-optical packet-switched networks.

Advances in photonic packet switching: an overview

The gain-saturated semiconductor-laser-amplifier (SLA) wavelength converter (WC) operates by the presence (absence) of a modulated optical input signal reducing (increasing) the gain experienced by a cw optical pump at a different wavelength.1 In a wavelength-division-multiplexed (WDM) network, a signal might pass through several WCs during its passage. To our knowledge, this is the first study of cascading this type of WC.

Cascaded optical wavelength converters

An edge-node traffic adaptation unit aimed at transporting Ethernet traffic over photonic networks is proposed. Performance assessment is performed through a novel semi-analytical procedure using real traffic traces bearing self-similarity features This method is able to take into account asynchronies between LANs and edge nodes. Results compare the number of LAN-to-LAN interconnections allowed by transparent photonic packet switching compared to conventional circuit switching Statistical multiplexing can significantly improve the number of VPNs despite overheads imposed by limitations of current photonic technology and traffic self- similarity. Design guidelines arising from the present results are briefly discussed.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/8799/27843/01242707.pdf

Ethernet over photonic packets: convergence model and performance assessment

This paper presents the outcomes of the optical packet switching over wavelength routed network (OPORON) project, which demonstrated an asynchronous end-to-end optical packet switched network. Several novel techniques and subsys- tems for optical packet-switched network are analyzed and de- scribed in details, and their functionalities are validated through a demonstrator. The demonstrated network comprises two wave- length agile edge routers with traffic-shaping capabilities, a fully controlled core router with wavelength conversion (WC) capa- bility, and a control plane. The OPORON edge router incorpo- rates a novel traffic aggregation method, asynchronous optical packet transceiver, and agile wavelength allocation mechanism. The OPORON core router is based on the WC and selection architecture. It utilizes a semiconductor optical-amplifier-based Mach-Zehnder interferometer wavelength converter, in combi- nation with an agile tunable wavelength source and an arrayed waveguide grating, for performing packet switching. The core router also utilizes an advanced and fully controllable mechanism for the packet switch control, which is implemented on field programmable gate array technology. Finally, the integration of the aforementioned subsystems is discussed, and the results of a complete and end-to-end asynchronous and variable length optical packet-switched demonstrator are presented.

Mike J. O'Mahony

Papers

Cascaded optical wavelength converters

Ethernet over photonic packets: convergence model and performance assessment

The "OPORON" Project: Demonstration of a Fully Functional End-to-End Asynchronous Optical