Optical grid infrastructure: Establishing multiple end-to-end lightpaths in optical networks

We introduce our optical grid infrastructure where end-to-end, bandwidth-guaranteed lightpaths are established simultaneously. This is developed on a lightpath network that employs wavelength-routing. One application may send a request for multiple lightpaths to the network, which establishes the lightpaths one-by-one. Thus, several lightpaths may be rejected due to simultaneous reservation of an identical wavelength or undesired wavelength use. The proposed control-layered structure consisting of application, optical-grid control, and optical-network control layers bridges the gap between applications and optical networks. The optical-grid control layer translates an application request to form a set of lightpaths into multiple requests for the network. This layer is also capable of adjusting the available network interfaces of the hosts and the available wavelengths of the network such that all the lightpaths are likely to be established. We address our testbed network in the Tokyo metropolitan area and a collaborative work with e-VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry), which requires long-distance, high-speed, and non-data loss communication circuits in the network.