| Acronym: COST 291 |
| Main Objective: The primary objective of the COST Action “Towards Digital Optical Networks” is to focus on novel network concepts and architectures exploiting the features and properties of photonic technologies, to enable future telecommunications networks. It is aiming to propose a new generation of systems and networks that will accommodate the unpredictable and growing size of data files and messages exchanged and stored as well as real time services (e.g. voice, video etc) over global distances requiring an agile Communication Grid supporting quality of services. These need to provide end-toend bandwidth for transmission of traffic for applications such as information retrieval, downloading (often multimedia) web software, exchange of various type of software (hundreds of Mbytes) and data models (Gbytes) etc as well as real time multimedia applications. These systems need to be very flexible and rapidly reactive to efficiently accommodate the abrupt and unpredictable changes in traffic statistics introduced by current and future applications with low endto- end latency. They will enable advanced features such as efficient and simple multicasting and broadcasting of broadband signals. In general, they need to support a future proof, flexible, efficient and bandwidth-abundant fiber-optic network infrastructure capable of supporting ubiquitous services in a resilient manner offering protection and restoration capabilities as well as secure services to the users. Transparency to various digital signals and protocols is required to eliminate the need for multilayer complex network architectures suffering by poor scalability for data services, high latency, complicated network management and high cost. This migration can be gradually achieved by removing and/or integrating intermediate layers. Flat and upgradeable network architectures supporting photonic core and access technologies with intelligent edge nodes at the interfaces will form a universal infrastructure offering a variety of services supported by multiple operators. The ease of maintenance, provisioning and resilient operation required in this type of networks will be achieved through advanced routing and management mechanisms, eliminating the requirement for ever increasing amounts of complex software raising the cost and limiting the network reliability and availability. This advanced photonic infrastructure will employ optical signal processing and dynamic impairment management to eliminate the limitations of the analogue nature of traditional optical networks, dense wavelength division multiplexing technologies for signal transmission and routing, and optical packet and/or burst switching to provide fine bandwidth granularity, network efficiency and flexibility. |
| Reference: |
| Funding: EU/COST |
| Start Date: 01-10-2004 |
| End Date: 01-10-2009 |
| Team: Antonio Luis Jesus Teixeira |
| Groups: Optical Communication Systems and Networking – Av |
| Partners: SIEMENS, AIT, OTHERS |
| Local Coordinator: Antonio Luis Jesus Teixeira |
| Links: Internal Page |
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Associated Publications
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