Title: Smarter Optical Networks for Smarter Cities
Abstract: During the past two decades, the Internet backbone was built out using optical networks with massive capacity to remove communication distance barriers and enable cloud computing in hyperscale data centers. This has brought about dramatic changes in the way we live, work, and play. The Internet is going local now to support smart cities with new classes of applications such as haptic control, 3D sensing, and autonomous vehicles. Many of these applications are highly latency sensitive and require high speed communication. In response, data centers are moving to the edges of the network to get closer to the users. 5G wireless standards seek to address these requirements, but require a scale up of access points and smaller latencies that call for entirely new access network architectures. Optical networks are emerging as a key technology to once again provide the backbone for this new ‘smart city’ Internet. However, the traditional ‘plumbing’ approach used in long haul backbone optical networks is not compatible with this environment. Optical networks need to become ‘smarter’, allowing for scalable, open, and autonomous software control. Optical networks need to work seamlessly with computing and wireless systems as part of a multi-domain, orchestrated software defined network (SDN). However, the complexity of optical transmission engineering remains an obstacle. This talk will describe the emerging roles that optical networks are expected play in 5G wireless systems and smart city applications. The state of the art for optical systems will be reviewed. We will present a non-intrusive optical probing technique that is used to determine static and dynamic transmission characteristics and facilitate stable software control. New physical layer SDN control techniques will also be described including capabilities to realize multi-domain transparent transmission functions.
Bio: Dr. Daniel Kilper is a research professor in the College of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona, Tucson. He holds a joint appointment in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Arizona and an adjunct faculty position in Electrical Engineering at Columbia University. He received a PhD in Physics from the University of Michigan in 1996. From 2000-2013, he was a member of technical staff at Bell Labs. Within both academia and industry, he has made contributions in the area of communication devices and systems primarily spanning three areas: energy efficient communication networks, optical performance monitoring, and dynamic optical networks. He is a senior member of IEEE and is an editor for the IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking and a steering committee member for the IEEE Green ICT Initiative. He currently serves as administrative director for the Center for Integrated Access Networks, an NSF Engineering Research Center His work has been recognized with the Bell Labs President's Gold Medal Award and he served on the Bell Labs President’s Advisory Council on Research.