Scope of Project

Services and new data processing applications have been increasing the required bandwidth. With the expansion of the fifth generation (5G) mobile network, a further increase in data volume is expected. As a result, current active data networks are reaching their capacity limits. The goal of this project is to find solutions to make better use of existing network resources and to increase the capacity of the networks with little additional investment.

Currently, only a small portion of the theoretically available bandwidth of the fiber is used for data transmission. The OptiCON project is investigating how the capacity can be increased by about fivefold. Consistent monitoring of the transmission quality and consequent adjustments of the data signals contribute to capacity optimization. For this purpose, new optical measurement technology has to be developed and the network control software has to be optimized. Furthermore, OptiCON develops novel measuring methods for power quality monitoring. The measured parameters are taken into account in the network control and planning. 

Contributions

Our contribution focuses on the design, implemention and evaluation of routing, modulation and spectrum assignment algorithms able to increase the planning performance in terms of network capacity and flexibility. Furthermore, the impact of resilience requirements and energy consumption will also be considered. Last but not least, the proposed solution will also be implemented in an SDN controller so that it can be evaluated in the OptiCON testbed. 

This work is partially funded by Germany Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under the project OptiCON (grant IDs 16KIS0991)

Funding

This work is partially funded by Germany Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under the project OptiCON (grant ID 16KIS0991).