Unified End-to-End Provisioning in Multi-Domain Metro-Core Networks (funded by Sprint)
Dr. Driss Benhaddou and Dr. Nasir Ghani (TTU)
Over the years, operators have deployed many differing networking technologies to support a growing and diverse array of services. These infrastructures are commonly partitioned into differing domains and layers in order to implement associated administrative and management, protocol. Clearly, each of these entities will posses their own set of service capabilities and control procedures, as dictated by technology type and vendor-implementation. For carriers operating multi-domain, multi-layer infrastructures, end-to-end control is becoming an increasingly critical requirement. In order to achieve end-to-end service provisioning across these diverse technology domains, operators today have to resort to manual procedures spanning a large number of provisioning systems. This is a slow, error-prone process and resultant bandwidth efficiencies can be very low due to the lack of integration between metro and core capacity planning. This project investigates the crucial optical control plane and operations systems support (OSS) architecture issues for Sprint’s metro-core network. The work started on April 2004 and will end on April 2005. It focuses on end-to-end service provisioning and restoration for multi-domain/layer settings. One of the key objectives is to help streamline metro-core provisioning and allow Sprint to induct next-generation technologies in a much more staged and cost-effective manner. Overall, the work will provide key input and direction as to the continued, and timely, future evolution of large-scale optical networking infrastructures. Indeed, this is an area of crucial importance to academic and industrial research communities in optical networking.