Currently participating in the following research projects:


HORIZON-SNS SElf-mAnaged Sustainable high-capacity Optical Networks (SEASON)

The goal of the SEASON project is to design and validate a sustainable transport network infrastructure able to support beyond 5G and new emerging services. The SEASON infrastructure will rely on the joint usage of Multi-Band (MB) and Space Division Multiplexing (SDM), spanning the access, aggregation, and metro/long-haul segments, supporting the requirements for x-haul, further integrating the packet/optical and computing layers, and targeting cost-effective capacity increase. A critical objective of such architecture is to ensure energy efficiency. SEASON will rely on power-efficient Digital Signal Processing (DSP), MBoverSDM optical switching, point-to-multipoint transceivers allowing traffic aggregation/router bypassing, and converged packet-optical solutions reducing the number of O/E/O conversions. Such complex infrastructure requires rethinking the control and orchestration systems towards autonomous optical networks, addressing not only the integration - in overarching control systems - of the Radio Access Network (RAN), access and transport segments but also adopting more agile DevOps methodologies. SEASON will leverage on cognitive networks powered by streaming telemetry, real-time network measurements and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML)-aided service management and orchestration for near-real time network operation, moving intelligence as close as possible to the data plane, and devising a distributed system based on multiple communicating agents and data-driven closed control loops. SEASON will have a clear impact on the society, in a context with increased needs of connectivity and higher capacity demand required for services such as VR/AR. The SEASON consortium includes major European telecom operators (Telefonica, TIM), major vendors (ADVA, Infinera P/G, Ericsson), three consolidated SMEs (Accelleran, Wings and WestAquila) and four top-reputed research centres and academia (CNIT, CTTC, Fraunhofer HHI, and UPC).



UNICO5G Towards a smart and effIcient telecoM Infrastructure meetiNG current and future industry needs (TIMING)

Identifying Industry 4.0 as a key vertical, TIMING targets to design a solution to enable e2e reliable TSN services supported by operators' infrastructures that are currently carrying on a best effort basis. TIMING will analyze TSN support in the Ethernet and Wi-Fi segments and identify the enhancements to be made for supporting the sub-millisecond latency for TSN systems. Scheduling solutions to support these enhancements will be devised. In addition, solutions to automate the deployment of e2e TSN services with assured performance will be designed. Such service automation relies on a control plane, which will include a TSN controller able to control and monitor Ethernet and Wi-Fi TSN nodes, a TSN Connectivity Manager to provide e2e connectivity across TSN and non-TSN segments, and a QoS estimation tool that includes accurate TSN traffic models. TIMING will build PoC demonstrators validating the whole TIMING architecture. The POC will demonstrate: (1) at the modeling level, a tool that evaluates the performance of the new TSN service to be deployed and the impact on the existing services (TSN and/or BE traffic); (2) at the control plane, the capability to deploy reliable e2e TSN services with committed performance in terms of e2e delay; and (3) at the infrastructure level, the capability to transport TSN traffic between two TSN domains: one with Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) emulating a factory, and the other with the AGV's controller, which requires bounded latency communications with the AVs; other services for loading the system will be also included. Finally, TIMING will maximize impact by influencing major vendors and service providers on the adoption of the developed principles through communication, dissemination, and standardization activities, while exploiting the results and knowledge obtained, and contributing to the digital transition of the industry and the green deal.



HORIZON-SNS Deep Programmability and Secure Distributed Intelligence for Real-Time End-to-End 6G Networks (DESIRE6G)

Over the past decades the mobile communications has evolved over the different generations to the current 5G, and transformed into a fundamental infrastructure that supports digital demands from all industry sectors. However, 5G systems are expected to fall short on meeting the anticipated stringent performance requirements for the new generation of real time mission-critical applications. In view of that, DESIRE6G will design and develop novel zero-touch control, management, and orchestration platform, with native integration of AI, to support eXtreme URLLC application requirements. DESIRE6G will re-architect mobile networks through a) its intent-based control and end-to-end orchestration that targets to achieve near real time autonomic networking; and b) a cloud-native unified programmable data plane layer supporting multi-tenancy. The latter will be supported by a generic hardware abstraction layer designed for heterogeneous systems. Flexible composition of modular micro-services for slice specific implementations and flexible function placement depending on HW requirements will enable granular use case instantiation and service level assurance with minimum resource consumption and maximum energy efficiency. The DESIRE6G data, control, management, and orchestration plane is supported by a pervasive monitoring system, extending from the network to the user equipment or IoT terminal. DESIRE6G will employ distributed ledger technology to support a) dynamic federation for services across of multiple administrative domains and b) infrastructure-agnostic software security. Finally, DESIRE6G will enable communication-, and energy- efficient distributed AI, at the network edge, while considering application-level requirements and resource constraints. The proposed innovations will be validated employing a VR/AR/MR and a Digital Twin application at two distinct experimental sites.



HORIZON-SNS PRogrammable AI-Enabled DeterminIstiC neTworking for 6G (PREDICT-6G)

6G is envisioned to accelerate the path started in 5G for catering to the needs of a wide variety of vertical use cases, both current and emerging. This will require major enhancements of the current 5G capabilities especially in terms of bandwidth, latency, reliability, security, and energy. PREDICT-6G's mission is therefore set towards the development of an end-to-end 6G (e2e) solution including architecture and protocols that can guarantee seamless provisioning of services for vertical use cases requiring extremely tight timing and reliability constraints. To succeed, the solution will target determinism network infrastructures at large, including wired and wireless segments and their interconnections. PREDICT-6G will develop a novel Multi-technology Multi-domain Data-Plane (MDP) overhauling the reliability and time sensitiveness design features existing in current wired and wireless standards. The ambition is for the MDP design to be inherently deterministic. To achieve this, PREDICT-6G will develop an AI-driven Multi-stakeholder Inter-domain Control-Plane (AICP) for the provisioning of deterministic network paths to support time sensitive services as requested by end-customers and with different scaling ambitions, e.g., from the network in a single vehicle to a large, geographically dispersed network. This requires timely monitoring and prediction of the behavior of the complete network, including identifying potential sources of quality violations and analyzing various routes of the traffic flows. These capabilities will be delivered through the PREDICT-6G AI-powered Digital Twin (DT) framework, allowing the prediction of the behavior of the end-to-end network infrastructure, and enabling anticipative control and validation of the network provisions to meet the real-world time-sensitive and reliability requirements of the running services.



HORIZON-CL4 Agile uLtra Low EnerGy secuRe netwOrks (ALLEGRO)

ALLEGRO aims at designing and validating a novel end-to-end sliceable, reliable, and secure architecture for next-generation optical networks, achieving high transmission/switching capacity -- with 10 Tb/s for optoelectronic devices and 1 Pbt/s for optical fiber systems --; low power consumption/cost -- with > 25% savings -- and secure infrastructures and data transfers. The architecture relies on key enabling innovations: i) smart, coherent transceivers exploiting multi-band & multi-fiber technologies for P2P and P2MP applications, based on e.g., high-speed plasmonic modulators/photodetectors and programmable silicon photonic integrated waveguide meshes; ii) loss-less, energy-efficient transparent photonic integrated optical switches, eliminating OEO conversions, e.g., with on-chip amplification in the O-band for datacom applications; iii) a consistent approach to security, in terms of functional/ protocol architectures and communications, further improving QKD systems, enabling optical channel co-existence and researching on quantum-resistant (post-quantum) cryptography, developing systems based on physically unclonable functions; and iv) a scalable AI/ML assisted control and orchestration system, responsible for autonomous networking, dynamic and constrained service provisioning, function placement and resource allocation, leveraging devices increasing programmability and overall network softwarization. To achieve the target objectives and KPIs, ALLEGRO has defined a clear methodology ending in ambitious demonstrators. The consortium includes a good balance of industry and research/academia with know-how in complementary fields. The results of ALLEGRO will be disseminated in leading conferences, events, and high-impact journals. They will have a concrete and measurable economic and social impact, contributing towards achieving key European objectives, reinforcing European leadership and digital sovereignty in the ongoing digital and green transition.



H2020 Beyond 5G - OPtical nEtwork coNtinuum (B5G-OPEN)
(https://www.b5g-open.eu)

B5G-OPEN targets the design, prototyping and demonstration of a novel end-to-end integrated packet-optical transport architecture based on MultiBand (MB) optical transmission and switching networks. MB expands the available capacity of optical fibres, by enabling transmission within S, E, and O bands, in addition to commercial C and/or C+L bands, which translates into a potential 10x capacity increase and low-latency for services beyond 5G. To realize multiband networks, technology advances are required, both in data, control and management planes. Concerning devices, these include new amplifiers, filterless subsystems, add/drop multiplexers, etc. Such technology advances complement novel packet-optical white boxes using flexible sliceable Bandwidth Variable Transceivers and novel pluggable optics. The availability of MB transmission will also lead to a complete redesign of the end-to-end architecture, removing boundaries between network domains and reducing electronic intermediate terminations. The control plane will be extended to support multiband elements and a 'domain-less' network architecture. It will rely on physical layer abstraction, new impairment modelling, and pervasive telemetry data collection to feed AI/ML algorithms that will lead to a Zero-Touch networking paradigm including a full featured node operating system for packet-optical whiteboxes. The results will be shown in two final demonstrations exposing the project benefits from operator and user perspectives. B5G-OPEN will have a clear impact on the society showing the evolution towards a world with increased needs of connectivity and higher capacity in support of new B5G services and new traffic patterns. The consortium includes partners from 8 countries: three major telecom operators, three vendors, four SMEs and four research centres and academia, combining several years of experience and a successful record in past European projects on related technologies, thus guaranteeing its success.



IBON: AI-Powered Intent-Based Packet And Optical Transport Networks and Edge and Cloud Computing for Beyond 5G

The aim of IBON is to design and build a ubiquitous, secure and explainable Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered intent-based networking (IBN) platform that spans end-to-end (from terminals to the RAN and transport network and from edge to cloud computing) and is aware of its state and context to autonomously take proactive actions for service assurance. The IBN platform is integrated in a zero-touch control and orchestration platform featuring an AI Function Orchestrator to manage AI pipelines. The objective is to create an AI-assisted elastic and dynamic infrastructure supporting per-domain and e2e networks and services real time (RT) e2e operation automation, ensuring near-RT decision making and non-RT tight coordination. Specific components will be developed and integrated to create an agile platform that goes well beyond 5G and supports application-level resilience and intelligence through replication and elasticity. Demonstration will be carried out in an experimental environment. The project will actively contribute to relevant standardization bodies and open source projects to promote IBON solutions to the wider community. IBON has the potential to create a significant shift in the way telecom services are commercialized, representing new market/higher volume opportunities for vendors, and tremendous potential for start-ups creating specialized applications.



MENTOR: Machine lEarning in optical NeTwORks
(https://mentor.astonphotonics.uk/)

Optical fiber networks is one of the major drivers of our societal progress and a key enabler of the global telecommunication infrastructure. Optical networks underwent considerable changes over the past decade, as consequence of a continuous growth (exceeding 20% per year) of bandwidth demand. The current growth sets strong requirements in terms of capacity and costs for the operators, which seek to decrease the cost per transmitted bit. Several solutions have been proposed, and among them wide-band is more favourable to network operators, compared to more/or novel fibers. However, wide-band optical system presents new major challenges: optical components must guarantee similar performance over a broad spectrum, network optimization is carried out on a non-flat spectrum and with a much larger number of channels making design, optimization and control a complex problem. Therefore, application of machine learning (ML) techniques is of the growing importance for high-capacity multi-band (MB) optical systems. ML is becoming the technique of choice to solve complex nonlinear technical problems, such as, advance component design and management of wide-band networks. The European Industrial Doctorate MENTOR presents a timely proposal to train 6 ESRs in the interdisciplinary field of high industrial importance: ML applications in multi-band optical communications. As ML can properly works only when a large amount of real data is available, it is crucial to bring together academic partners and the industry that provide access to the data. MENTOR consortium offers the strong industrial commitment of four large companies that significantly contributed in defining the research and training topics to be studied together with the world-leading academic partners in MENTOR. MENTOR will contribute to the European economy by design of the next generation of high-capacity optical networks.



Empowering Clean-energy Transition of Energy Intensive Industry Through Advanced and Innovative Digital Tools (Genius)

In GENIUS, we show the importance of 5G technologies for vertical industries and participate in the development of a complete digital twin (DT) for maximising the synergies of local renewable power generation and electric vehicle fleets..



Past research projects:


NGIatlantic: Experimental Assesment of Fast Quantum Key Distribution
(https://ngiatlantic.eu/)

To setup the EU-US Experimental Quantum Communication Laboratory (EQC Lab), as part of the NGIatlantic.eu 3rd Open Call.



REAL-NET: REAL-time monitoring and mitigation of nonlinear effects in optical NETworks
(https://real-net.astonphotonics.uk/)

The exponential surge in the global data traffic driven by the skyrocketing proliferation of different bandwidth-hungry on-line services and various broadband services, brings about the escalating pressure on the speed (capacity) and quality (bit error rate) characteristics of information systems. It is well recognized nowadays that rapidly increasing data rates in the core fibre communication systems are quickly approaching the limits of current transmission technologies, many of which were originally developed for communication over linear (e.g. radio) channels. It is widely accepted that the nonlinear transmission effects in optical fibre represent now a major limiting factor in modern fibre-optic communication systems. Nonlinear properties make optical fibre channels considerably different from wireless and other traditional linear communications channels. There is a clear need for development of radically different methods for coding, transmission, and (pre & post) processing of information that take the nonlinear properties of the optical fibre into account and for training of a new generation of engineers with expertise in: optical communications, nonlinear science methods, digital signal processing (DSP), design of implementable algorithms. From the industry perspectives, design of practical and implementable processing algorithms requires knowledge of ASICs and real world conditions and restrictions. The multi-national & multi-interdisciplinary REAL-NET project provides timely doctoral training for 6 PhD students through industry relevant research in the fast growing area of high practical relevance and will lead to development of novel practically implementable disruptive techniques for fibre-optic communications.



METRO-HAUL: METRO High bandwidth, 5G Application-aware optical network, with edge storage, compUte and low Latency
(https://metro-haul.eu/)

The aim of this project is to design and build a smart, but cost-effective, optical metro infrastructure able to support traffic originating from heterogeneous 5G access networks, addressing the anticipated capacity increase and its specific characteristics such as mobility, low latency, and high bandwidth. This infrastructure will be able to also support a wide variety of 5G applications with special emphasis on services from various industries vertical to the ICT. This will be achieved by architecting new access-facing and core-facing nodes, complete with storage and compute facilities, interconnected by novel, spectrally efficient, and adaptive optical transmission networks. Advanced concepts, such as hardware disaggregation and virtualisation, will assist in hitting challenging cost targets whilst enabling automation and programmability - all supported by a purpose-designed SDN-based control plane which will interface with client applications, intelligently catering for the wide range of 5G KPIs. METRO-HAUL will coordinate the disparate elements of transmission, switching, networking, compute, and storage, orchestrating dynamic solutions for multiple 5G applications. METRO-HAUL will carry out Proof of Concept demonstrations of its networking solution involving the interconnection of metro node prototypes, the use of the project's transmission technologies, and the associated control plane and orchestration software. The final project demonstrations will also involve the demonstration of actual 5G and vertical services across the METRO-HAUL test-bed. Additionally, the project will actively participate in the relevant standardization bodies, promoting METRO-HAUL solutions to the wider community.



TWINS: cogniTive 5G application-aware optical metro netWorks Integrating moNitoring, data analyticS and optimization

The TWINS architecture will be developed to integrate a wide range of optical technologies that will be controlled using automation schemes and programmability features that will enable concepts such as hardware disaggregation and virtualization, the coordination of which will be supported by a purposely designed control plane. Optical nodes will be dynamically adapted to the needs of specific services, optimally exploiting the data plane through use of relevant data monitoring and analysis schemes. In fact, TWINS aims at designing and demonstrating a set of monitoring solutions to remarkably enhance the performance, reliability, and security of optical metro networks.
The proposed solutions include:
* integrated monitoring system for in-line assessment of optical impairments such as OSNR, CD, PMD, phase noise, and spectral shape
* distributed sensing system with integrated interrogator for security analysis and network failure prediction, detection and localization.
The control plane will be also responsible for the provisioning of 5G and vertical industry services that require the allocation of heterogeneous compute, storage and networking resources and ensure the required end-to-end QoS and QoE levels for each application. The TWINS control plane will leverage on the well-established SDN and NFV paradigms and exploit the benefits of a unified system, coordinating networking, computing, storage, transmission, and switching aspects, enabling abstraction at different levels.
Through the combination of improved, elastic-based optical techniques and intelligent, dynamic management of 5G applications, TWINS will support more than 10 times the capacity of current metro networks.
TWINS will perform PoC demonstrations to illustrate its network solution, software metro node prototypes and associated control plane / orchestration software. Detailed performance evaluation of both data and control planes will be carried out.



SYNERGY: Service-oriented hYbrid optical NEtwork and cloud infrastructuRe featuring high throuGhput and ultra-low latencY

A critical barrier to the future growth of the Internet and the development of new innovative services is the underlying network infrastructure on which the Internet connects users with content and applications. Service providers can no simply keep spending linearly to service the internet; a new approach is required.
In light of this vision, SYNERGY proposes a new architecture designed to cope with the increasing complexity of networks technologies and services. Specifically, SYNERGY aims to develop and orchestrate clouds with core optical networks, dynamically controlling intra and inter data centre (DC) connections to maximize the overall performance enabling high throughput low-latency services whilst minimizing total costs. The main building blocks are:
1) An innovative distributed DC architecture consisting of a set of DC placed in selected core locations to accelerate content delivery, reduce core network traffic, and ensure very low latency.
2) Dynamic orchestration of the distributed DC and the core network. SYNERGY massively uses optical transport for long hauling traffic from access directly to the core network, thus bypassing metro; users in access networks and DCs are directly connected through flexgrid optical links.
The proposed network transformation, together with geographically distributing elements, enables the use of green energy sources and will result in reducing energy consumption. SYNERGY will provide unprecedented Quality of Experience (QoE), greatly reducing costs by coordinating software defined networking (SDN) and cloud management and facilitating service chaining by virtualizing network functions. SYNERGY will enable new services at reduced costs and technology commercial exploitation into new systems.
SYNERGY architecture scopes the traditional limitations of cross-domain segmentation by leveraging on infrastructure programmatic capabilities. The SYNERGY project will provide a holistic Service and Network Control and Management solution that will enable a dynamic and optimized provision of network services orchestrating service functions across DCs, and ensuring a consistent end-to-end connectivity of telecom networks and DC infrastructures.



IDEALIST: Industry-Driven Elastic and Adaptive Lambda Infrastructure for Service and Transport Networks
(http://www.ict-idealist.eu/)

Traffic demand is increasing dramatically, year on year, with typical growth figures of up to 60% for Internet based traffic. Such traffic increase is impacting on both network costs and power consumption. Moreover, traffic is not only increasing but becoming much more dynamic, both in time and direction. For these reasons, transport network evolution from current DWDM systems towards elastic optical networks, based on flexgrid transmission and switching technologies, could significantly increase both transport network scalability and flexibility. Further benefits come from multilayer interworking mechanisms enabling electronic switching technologies (IP/MPLS, OTN, etc) to directly control the bandwidth of the Bandwidth Variable Transponders (BVT) for optical bandwidth optimization purposes.
This then defines the key objective behind IDEALIST: To research in detail a cost and power efficient transport network architecture able to carry a wide range of signal bandwidths, each of which will be varying in real time in direction and magnitude, and some of which will be extremely large and possibly exceeding 1Tb/s. The network architecture proposed by IDEALIST is based on four technical pillars:
* Transport systems enabling flexible transmission and switching beyond 400Gbps per channel.
* Control plane architecture for multilayer and multidomain elastic optical networks.
* Dynamic network resources allocation at both IP and elastic optical layers.
* Multilayer network optimization tools enabling both off-line planning and on-line network re-optimization in elastic optical networks.
The intention is that the IDEALIST network architecture will be easily industrialised. Therefore, feasibility studies and experimental implementation and demonstration of prototypes will be key activities, as well. IDEALIST will also feed the collaboration with other Projects and the submission of contributions to ITU-T, OIF, IETF, thus reinforcing European position in standardization bodies.



GÉANT: Pan-European research and education network that interconnects Europe's National Research and Education Networks
(http://www.geant.net/)

Within the GÉANT project, REACTION targets all the scientific and technical objectives of the GN3plus call, topic 6. REACTION will propose, design, and validate a flexible optical network scenario enabling software-controlled super-channel transmission. A novel bandwidth variable transponder (BVT) supporting 1 Tb/s multi-carrier transmission will be developed. The considered BVT will be enhanced to support, besides dynamic adaptation among different bit rates, modulation formats, spectrum allocation, and coding/FEC types, the sliceable functionality. These solutions will be assessed in terms of networking performance through specific simulative studies in the case of provisioning, elastic operations, de-fragmentation and restoration scenarios.
Moreover, specifically designed control plane functionalities and advanced routing and spectrum assignment (RSA) algorithms will be proposed and experimentally validated. In particular, the control plane will rely on the GMPLS protocol suite extended for flexible optical networks and on an innovative two-level active stateful PCE implementing the new BGP-LS advertising solution. A comparative study with SDN-based solutions will be also provided.
Solutions and outcomes will be tailored to R&E networks. Simulations will be specifically tailored in the context of NREN networks with related expected traffic matrices. Advantages on the adoption of flexible optical networks by NRENs will be assessed in the context of spectrum efficiency, CAPEX and OPEX. Finally, the flexible optical networks simulator developed in REACTION using OPNET Modeler will be released as project outcome to be used and upgraded within GÉANT community.



STRONGEST: Scalable, Tunable and Resilient Optical Networks Guaranteeing Extremely-high Speed Transport
(http://www.ict-strongest.eu/)

Internet traffic has been growing quickly for many years, despite adverse economic conditions and this growth will continue in the future. To cope with this evolution, the cost of today’s network solutions is still too high.
In addition, in line with the EC goal of reducing the overall emissions, energy efficiency should be widely improved, using whenever possible optics instead of electronics where only transport is required.
Moreover, due to the unpredictable traffic increase, flexible bandwidth management has to be used instead of fixed allocated bandwidth.
In the data plane, current equipment and network architectures still provide limited scalability, are not costeffective and do not properly guarantee end-to-end quality of service
For these reasons, the key requirements of innovative ultra-high bandwidth networks refer to scalability, flexibility, assurance of end-to-end quality of service and energy efficiency, beside reduction of total cost of ownership.
To design and demonstrate an evolutionary ultra-high capacity multilayer transport network, compatible with Gbit/s access rates, based on optimized integration of Optical and Packet nodes, and equipped with a multi-domain, multi-technology control plane. This network will offer:
* High scalability and flexibility
* Guaranteed end-to-end performance and survivability
* Increased energy efficiency
* Reduced total cost of ownership
Feasibility studies and experimental implementation and demonstration of prototypes will be key activities, as well.
STRONGEST will also feed the collaboration with other Projects and the submission of specific contributions to ITU-T, OIF, IETF, thus reinforcing European position in standardization bodies.


VISION Project
(http://www.cenit-vision.org/)

Today the media and communication services are essential for the development of social and professional relationships. The advances of recent years in information technologies have brought a revolution in the development of these services, greatly boosting the economic and social development in industrialized countries.
Among all media, video media are the most accurately represent real communication, mainly because humans are visually oriented. The images are not only the most effective mean of communication, but it is one that contains a greater amount of information when compared to the written word. And the human face is the most important source of information, while their expressions give meaning to the word and voice.
Yet, despite all the technological breakthroughs achieved in recent years in practically all fields, the video communication systems have failed to replace displacement and meetings. The fundamental reason lies in the fact that these systems do not have the ability to convey a real sense of reality and presence. Users participating in a videoconference session, still have the feeling of being speaking through a machine rather than maintaining a real encounter between two people.
VISION is a CENIT project of the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade of Spain, managed by the CDTI framed within the Spanish government's project Ingenio 2010 to increase investment in R & D, both public and private, in the coming years with the aim of achieving in 2010 to 2% of GDP. The project has a duration of 4 years ranging from 2007 to 2010 inclusive.


DICONET: Dynamic Impairment Constraint Network for Transparent Mesh Optical Networks
(http://www.diconet.eu/)

DICONET project is targeting a novel approach to optical networking providing a disruptive solution for the development of the core network of the future.
It is the vision and goal of our consortium to provide ultra high speed end-to-end connectivity with quality of service and high reliability through the use of optimised protocols and routing algorithms that will complement a flexible control and management plane offering flexibility for the future network infrastructure.
We plan to investigate, design, implement and test new routing and wavelength assignment algorithms considering as constraints physical impairments that arise in transparent core networks. These algorithms will be incorporated into a novel dynamic network planning tool that would consider dynamic traffic characteristics, varying physical impairment and component characteristics and a reconfigurable optical layer. The use of this novel planning tool in conjunction with proper extensions to the control plane of core optical networks that will be designed, implemented and tested by our consortium will make possible to realize the vision of transparency, while offering efficient resource utilization and strict quality of service guarantees based on certain service level agreements.
The combinations of the tools, algorithms and protocols that will developed by the uniquely qualified DICONET consortium together with new technologies and architectures that will be considered as enablers for the network of the future will assist in overcoming the expected long term limitations of current core network capabilities. The DICONET scope and objectives, address dynamic cross-layer network planning and optimization while considering the development of a future transport network infrastructure which ensures fail-safe network configuration and operation. Our approach will greatly contribute as a basic element in achieving resilience and transparency of the Future Internet."


BONE:Building the Future Optical Network in Europe
(http://www.ict-bone.eu/)

A European ICT Network of Excellence.
The BONE-proposal builds on the foundations laid out by the ePhoton/ONe projects in the previous Framework Programme. This Network of Excellence has brought together over several years the research activities within Europe in the field of Optical Networks and the ONE-project intends to validate this effort by stimulating a more intensified collaboration, exchange of researchers and builiding on Virtual Centres of Excellence that can serve to European industry with education and training, research tools and testalbs and pave the way to new technologies and architectures. BONE clearly identifies the existence of the current technologies and also recognizes the fact that usera also require the mobility of wireless access, but htis mobile connection ends at a gateway or access points and from there a fixed connection is required and this fixed connection will finally be an optical link.
The photonic networks laboratory is active in service awareness networks and is working on programmable service composition Algorithms for service oriented Optical Networks. In fact we In fact, RACTI is developing optimization algorithms using evolutionary schemes for the case of composite services, whose structures are described by abstract processes, i.e, processes containing abstract services, where the aim is to find the best combination of concrete attributes, from the QoS point of view, at run time. We are also active on OBS networks, where we develop new assembly and scheduling algorithms with emphasis in increasing TCP throughput and in guaranteeing QoS in demanding application like video.