Background

Novel and higher-quality Internet services fuel an exponential growth of traffic in transport networks. The energy consumption of such networks grows accordingly. A promising countermeasure to this effect is the dynamic reconfiguration of network ressources in order to match the fluctuations in traffic load. To this purpose a mechanism is used which optimizes the topology of a transport network depending on the available ressources and the traffic load. This topology has to be established in the optical layer using lightpaths, ie. optical connections between network nodes. This requires meeting ressource constraints and continuity criterions. For example every wavelength ie. color may exist only once per fiberlink to avoid creating a conflict (cf. figure).

Task

The IKR-developed tool which serves to analyze the effects of the dynamic operation of optical networks currently does not consider the establishment of the lightpaths. In this project you will identify, implement and analyze approaches to realize lightpaths suitable for dynamic optical bypassing.

This project involves the following tasks:

Acquired Knowledge and Skills

You will learn to identify a solution approach for a specific problem in literature, to adapt and to implement it. You will gain insight into multi-layer networks and heuristic algorithms. In addition, you will gain experience in using an extensive, modular, object-oriented software framework.