Managing Trac Growth in Next-Generation Telecom Networks

By Rajesh Roy B.S. (Jadavpur University, India) 2006 M.S. (University of California, Davis) 2007 Dissertation Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science in the Office of Graduate Studies of the University of California Davis Approved:

Biswanath Mukherjee, Chair

Charles Martel

Dipak Ghosal Committee in Charge 2010

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To my father, mother, and big brother . . .

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Contents
List of Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . List of Tables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Introduction 1.1 WDM Network Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1.1 Optical Core Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1.2 Optical Access Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Multipath Routing in SONET/SDH-over WDM Mesh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Trac Engineering (TE) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4 Network Engineering (Upgradation) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5 Organization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Degraded-Service-Aware Multipath Provisioning 2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 6 8 10 12 12 14 14 17 19 vi ix x 1 1 1 3

2.2 Related Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.1 Routing and Bandwidth Allocation (Circuit Layer) . . 2.2.2 Routing-Only Approaches (Packet Layer) . . . . . . . 2.3 Problem Formulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 Heuristic: Degraded-Service-Aware Multipath Provisioning (DSAMP) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4.1 Discovery of Routes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4.2 Bandwidth Allocation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5 Illustrative Numerical Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Telecom Mesh Network Upgrade to Manage Trac Growth 3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

20 20 21 23 24 29 29

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3.2 A Network-Cut Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Computing Cut-exhaustion Probability . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 r-Drop Cut-Exhaustion Probability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5 Localizing Critical Cuts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.6 Illustrative Numerical Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Multi-Period Upgrading Approaches for Telecom Networks 4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

33 36 39 43 46 53 54 54 57 60 61 62 66 70 75

4.2 Related Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Exhaustion Probability Modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

4.4 Network Upgrade Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4.1 Upgrading for Internet Service Provider . . . . . . . . 4.4.2 Upgrading for Network Operator . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.5 Illustrative Numerical Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

5 Towards Next-Generation Broadband Access Technologies: The Virtue of Sharing 5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 76 80 82 84 84 87 87 90 90 92 92

5.2 User Behavior and Trac Characteristic . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 Simulation Model and Setup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 Simulation Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4.1 Total PON Utilization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4.2 Throughput per Heavy User . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

5.4.3 Packet Loss Ratio per Heavy User . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4.4 Average Packet Delay per Heavy User . . . . . . . . . 5.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Performance of 10G-EPON 6.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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6.2 Basics of 10G-EPON Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2.1 Ethernet Framing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2.2 Bandwidth Assignment Mechanism . . . . . . . . . . 6.2.3 Burst-Mode Operation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 Components of 10G-EPON Transmission Overhead . . . . . 6.4 Evaluation of Overheads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4.1 Forward-Error-Correction (FEC) Overhead . . . . . .

93 95 95 95 97 99 99

6.4.2 Codeword-Quantization Overhead . . . . . . . . . . . 100 6.4.3 Time-Quantum Rounding Overhead . . . . . . . . . . 102 6.4.4 Idle-Prex Overhead . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 6.4.5 Burst-Mode (BM) Transmission Overhead . . . . . . 103 6.4.6 Guard-Band Overhead 6.4.7 Control Overhead . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106

6.4.8 Discovery-Process Overhead . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 6.5 Overall 10G-EPON Transmission Eciency . . . . . . . . . 108 6.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 7 Conclusion 111

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List of Figures

1.1 Telecom network hierarchy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 A wavelength-routed optical WDM network. . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Passive Optical Network (PON) architecture. . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Multipath routing: classication chart 1. 2.2 Multipath routing: classication chart 2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

2 3 4 25 26 27 27 28 28 33 37

2.3 Sample network topology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 Fraction of connections unprovisioned. . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5 Fraction of bandwidth unprovisioned. . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6 Eect of degraded-service provisioning. . . . . . . . . . . .

3.1 Example network with network cut. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 A cut-to-link transformation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Markov chain of the busy-wavelength distribution over a network cut. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Cut-exhaustion probability under dierent trac-growth models. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5 r-drop Markov chain of the busy-wavelength distribution over a network cut. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

38

40

42 42

3.6 Time-varying (N + r + 1) (N + r + 1) matrix A(t).

3.7 r-drop cut-exhaustion probability under dierent trac growth models. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.8 Sample network topology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.9 Exhaustion probability under constant trac model. . . . 3.10 Percentage of blocked connections for one-, two-, three-, four-, ve- and six-hop routes due to Cut C1 . . . . . . . . . 3.11 Exhaustion probability of Cuts C1 and C2 in Fig. 3.8 under linear trac-growth model. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 49 44 47 48

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3.12 Exhaustion probability for cut C(S, T ) of the topology in Fig. 3.2 under linear trac-growth model. . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.13 Capacity assignment of critical cuts C1 and C2 under a linear trac-growth model. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Capacity requirements of a link under dierent load. . . . 52 60 63 66 71 71 51

4.2 Example of cost-optimized routing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Illustrative example of NUSP. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4 Performance comparison of NUSP with other approaches. . 4.5 Capacity distribution for dierent links by NUSP. . . . . . . 4.6 Total cost and number of line cards required by NUNO in a multi-period approach. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.7 Total cost and number of line cards required by NUNO in a single-period approach. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.8 Total cost and number of line cards required considering YoY cost depreciation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 WDM PON setup with 32 ONUs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 10G-EPON setup with 32 ONUs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 Total upstream (US) bandwidth utilization vs. US oered load. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 Total downstream (DS) bandwidth utilization vs. DS oered load. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.5 Upstream (US) throughput of heavy user. . . . . . . . . . . 5.6 Upstream packet loss ratio of a heavy user. . . . . . . . . . 5.7 Upstream packet loss distribution over dierent packet sizes under 100% load at ONU. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.8 Average upstream PON delay of a heavy user. . . . . . . . . 6.1 Internal structure of the upstream channel data burst in 10G-EPON. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

72

72

74 82 83

85

86 88 89

89 90

96

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6.2 Percentage of FEC overhead in upstream channel for different polling cycles and number of ONUs. . . . . . . . . . . 100 6.3 Codeword-quantization overhead for various polling cycle lengths and number of ONUs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 6.4 TQ rounding overhead in upstream channel for various polling cycle lengths and number of ONUs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 6.5 Idle-prex overhead for dierent number of ONUs and cycle time. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 6.6 Burst-mode transmission overhead for various polling cycle lengths and number of ONUs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 6.7 Guard-band overhead for dierent number of ONUs and cycle time. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 6.8 Control message overhead for 10G-EPON for various polling cycle lengths and number of ONUs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107

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List of Tables

3.1 Trac demand matrix. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1 List of acronyms used in this chapter. . . . . . . . . . . . .

34 94

6.2 Upstream 10G-EPON performance for 32 ONUs with 1, 2, 4, and 8 ms polling cycles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 6.3 Upstream 10G-EPON performance for 128 ONUs with 1, 2, 4, and 8 ms polling cycles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 6.4 Downstream 10G-EPON performance for 32 ONUs with 1, 2, 4, and 8 ms polling cycles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 6.5 Downstream 10G-EPON performance for 128 ONUs with 1, 2, 4, and 8 ms polling cycles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110

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Acknowledgments
First, I want to thank Professor Biswanath Mukherjee, my research adviser and committee chair, who has been an inspiring example throughout my research work. I learned a lot from his guidance and encouragement throughout the course of my graduate study. I feel inspired by his creativity, dedication, and desire for nothing but perfection. This work would not have been completed without his encouragement and patience. I am also grateful to Prof. Dipak Ghosal, Prof. Charles Martel, Prof. S. Felix Wu, Prof. Xin Liu, and Prof. Venkatesh Akella for serving on my dissertation and qualifying committees. Their insightful feedback and suggestions have improved the quality of this work. On numerous occasions, I sought and received advice from Prof. Massimo Tornatore. I gratefully acknowledge his help, which was inuential in my work. I would like to express my humble gratitude to Dr. Glen Kramer from Teknovus Inc. for giving me the opportunity to work with him. The countless hours of brainstorming sessions about the life cycles of bit stream have not only shaped my logical thinking but also revalidated my passion for networks. It has been a privilege to work with him. It has also been a great pleasure to be part of the Networks Laboratory at UC Davis. I thank all the members of this lab for creating a friendly and warm ambience for research and study. Many thanks to Dr. Amitava Banarjee, Dr. Vishwanath Ramamurthi, Dr. Suman Sarkar, Dr. Ming Xia, Dr. Joon-Ho Choi, Dr. Dragos Andrei, Pulak Chowdhury, Dr. Davide Cuda, Dr. Ananya Das, Dr. Marilet De Andrade Jardin, Menglin Liu, Avishek Nag, Abu (Sayeem) Reaz, Lei Shi, Dr. Cicek Cavadar, Dr. Eiman Al-Otaibi, Dr. Huan Song, Dr. Lei Song, Yi Zang, and Uttam Mandal for their constant support. Last but not the least, I would like to thank my parents who have

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been a constant source of support and encouragement throughout my life. I thank my brother, my best friend, and my rockstar Rajib, for always being there whenever I needed him. Without my familys support, encouragement, and help, I would not have been come to this point of my life.

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Rajesh Roy December, 2010 Computer Science Managing Trac Growth in Next-Generation Telecom Networks Abstract This dissertation investigates how to optimally manage the trac and its growth as well as the resources in a telecom network using optical wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) technology. A part of this dissertation addresses the Trac Engineering (TE) problem, which determines how to set up explicit routes between sourcedestination pairs for various trac demands so that the utilization of network resources is optimized. Our proposed algorithm also supports degraded-service, which is the amount of trac that is guaranteed to be supported even in case of a failure. However, we need to not only employ ecient trac engineering methods to utilize the existing network resources optimally, but also we need to periodically upgrade the network to meet the increasing trac demands. Such upgrades, which are referred to as Network Engineering (NE), determine the additional network resources that must be provided to meet the network performance while minimizing the incremental network cost. Our analysis shows how capacity exhaustion of critical cut sets indicates urgency of the need for upgrading a mesh network. Upgrading issues are also addressed from the viewpoints of two dierent business entities, namely an Internet service provider (ISP) and a network operator. We propose algorithms to optimize upgrade requirements of both of these entities. Our solutions achieve signicant cost savings compared to conventional approaches. We also investigate upgrade options for the access network which connects commercial and residential subscribers to the telecom central of-

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ce (CO) and which is considered one of the most important parts of the Internet hierarchy. We perform a comparative study of the most prominent broadband technologies, namely EPON and WDM PON, and provide results which will motivate the practitioner towards development and adaptation of such technologies. We also report the performance of 10G EPON under practical deployment scenarios. Our results should help to guide and steer the deployment of this prominent broadband technology.

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Chapter 1
Introduction
1.1
1.1.1

WDM Network Architecture

Optical Core Network

Wavelength-Division Multiplexing (WDM) can provide inexpensive, reliable, and high-speed communication over long distances. Thus it is the best technology to satisfy the huge bandwidth requirements of todays network. WDM technology is very attractive for backbone or core networks that operate at very high transmission rates. Connectivity of such a network is depicted in Fig. 1.1. Moreover, such an optical core network provides a common infrastructure to deliver a variety of services. In a wavelength-routed network, a lightpath is the basic communication approach. A lightpath is a direct optical transmission channel between two network nodes that may be located geographically far apart, and it can operate at the rate of several Gbps. An example of a lightpath is a circuit between two client network elements (NE), e.g., IP routers, ATM switches, etc., as in Fig. 1.2. In the absence of any wavelengthconversion device, a lightpath occupies the same wavelength throughout its path in the network, which is referred to as a wavelength-continuous network. This requirement can be relaxed if the network has wavelength converters.

Figure 1.1: Telecom network hierarchy.

An optical network with optical crossconnects (OXC) is expected to have dynamic lightpath provisioning capability. Figure 1.2 provides a logical view of such a network. Conceptually, it has data and control planes. The data plane provides high-speed data transmission, and the control plane provides signaling capability to dynamically add and delete connections. Typically, in a long-distance, high-speed network, the OXCs are interconnected through bers in a mesh topology. A lightpath-provisioning request can be initiated by the network operator from a network management system (NMS), or by a client network equipment (NE) through the standard User-Network Interface (UNI) [1]. Upon the arrival of such a request, the route computation module (which can be part of NMS or part of the control plane) computes a route (or a set of routes) based on the current network state. If an eligible route (or set of routes) is found (which can satisfy the bandwidth request between

a source-destination pair), the control plane will signal the OXCs along the route(s) to congure themselves.

Figure 1.2: A wavelength-routed optical WDM network.

1.1.2

Optical Access Network

The access network that connects commercial and residential subscribers to the central oce (CO), also known as the rst mile of access (depicted in Fig. 1.1), is considered one of the most important parts of the telecom hierarchy, and it greatly inuences the users broadband experience. Residential subscribers demand rst-mile access solutions that provide high bandwidth and oer media-rich services. Similarly, corporate users demand broadband infrastructure that connects their local-area networks to the Internet backbone. In recent years, the most popular broadband technology which has shown the potential to meet the future bandwidth demands is the Passive Optical Network (PON) (Fig. 1.3). A PON is a point-to-multipoint (physical topology) optical network, where an optical line terminal (OLT) at the CO is connected to many optical network units (ONUs) at cus-

tomer premises through one or multiple 1:N optical splitters1 (or arrayed waveguide grating (AWG)). The network between the OLT and the ONU is passive, i.e., it does not have active electronic devices and therefore does not require any power supply. A typical PON deployment uses a single ber from the CO to the splitter or AWG and employs one or multiple wavelength channel(s) to communicate to ONUs.

Figure 1.3: Passive Optical Network (PON) architecture.

The dominant PON technologies, namely Ethernet PON (EPON, standardized by IEEE) and Gigabit PON (GPON, standardized by ITU-T), use Time-Division Multiplexing Access (TDMA) mechanism to share the communication channels among its users. TDM PON uses a single wavelength in each of the two directions-downstream (CO to end users) and upstream (end users to CO), and the wavelengths are multiplexed on the same ber through coarse WDM (CWDM). Thus, the bandwidth available in a single wavelength is shared among all end users. The other variant of the PON technology, which employs a dedicated wavelength channel to achieve Point-to-Point (P2P) connectivity between
The passive splitter splits an optical signal (power) from one ber into several bers and reciprocally, combines optical signals from multiple bers into one. This device is an optical coupler. In its simplest form, an optical coupler consists of two bers fused together. Signal power received on any input port is split between both output ports. The splitting ratio of a splitter can be controlled by the length of the fused region.
1

the OLT and each individual ONU on top of the point-to-multipoint physical topology, is known as WDM PON. In the downstream direction in the WDM PON, the wavelength channels are routed from the OLT to the ONUs by a passive AWG instead of a passive splitter used in the TDM PON. Every WDM PON ONU on the same ber plant receives a unique wavelength with the help of the AWG, which is a passive optical wavelength-routing device. A generic colorless wide-band (wavelength agnostic, i.e., identical components regardless of the working wavelength) receiver is used in the ONU to receive the ONU-specic wavelength. A multi-wavelength source at the OLT is used for transmitting multiple wavelengths to the various ONUs. Among various WDM PON architectures, a solution based on the wavelength-locked (i.e., the laser excites only one mode when a well-adjusted external optical signal is coming in) Fabry-Perot laser diodes (FP LDs) has become most popular [2]. This architecture uses a spectrum-sliced broadband light source (BLS1) (originated from the OLT) to excite the FP LDs residing in the ONUs for upstream communication.

1.2

Multipath Routing in SONET/SDH-over WDM Mesh

Each wavelength channel in an optical WDM network can carry trac based on traditional Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM) approaches such as SONET/SDH2 , which are widely used in our telecom backbone networks. However, traditional SONET/SDH networks are quite inecient because they require contiguous concatenation for multi-timeslot connections. Hence, to eciently support data trac with variable bandwidth needs, such as IP and Ethernet data, traditional SONET/SDH is
SONET stands for Synchronous Optical Network, and it is a prelavent standard in North America. SDH stands for Synchronous Digital Hierarchy, it is almost an equivalent system as SONET, and it is prevalent in Europe and most of the rest of the world.
2

enhanced to next-generation SONET/SDH. In a next-generation SONET/SDH network, multipath routing can be achieved as well by virtual concatenation (VCAT) and link-capacity adjustment scheme (LCAS) [3]. VCAT is an inverse-multiplexing technique that groups an arbitrary number of SONET/SDH containers, which may not be contiguous, to create a larger container. It allows a concatenated STS-n (n = 1, 3, 12, ...) demand to be split into multiple (k) pieces of bandwidth of equal ( n ) or unequal size. The source node sends trac down k these k members of the Virtual Concatenation Group (VCG) and the sink node reconstructs the data stream. For example, a 1-Gbps demand can be mapped to 7 STS-3s or 21 STS-1s connections. A network operator can combine any number of either low-order (VT1.5s/VT2s in SONET) or high-order (STS-1s/STS-3cs in SONET) containers, depending on the switching granularity, to create a VCAT group. More importantly, the standard allows each of these VCG members to be routed independently. As a result, VCAT enables the operator to carry a single connection over multiple paths. Since data trac is bursty, it is desirable that the SONET/SDH transport network can dynamically adjust the bandwidth allocated to a connection to accommodate its trac uctuation. Link-Capacity Adjustment Scheme (LCAS) [3] serves this purpose. LCAS is a two-way signaling protocol built on VCAT, and it can dynamically adjust the bandwidth of a VCAT connection by adding or deleting VCG members in a hitless manner (without disrupting the trac carried on the existing VCG members).

1.3

Trac Engineering (TE)

In todays high-speed networks, shortest-path routing with some simple metric such as hop count or link distance is typically employed. Al-

though the simplicity of this approach allows routing on very large networks, it may not make the best use of the network resources [4]. In large backbone networks, service providers typically have to explicitly manage the trac ows in order to optimize the use of the network resources. This process is often referred to as Trac Engineering (TE). More formally, the trac engineering problem can be stated as provisioning connections between the network nodes to satisfy trac demands while optimizing the network resources. Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) is an example scheme that supports TE because it provides the essential capabilities for explicit routing in a high-speed network. The existing protocols in MPLS for establishing label-switched paths (LSPs), support explicit routes. In addition, the MPLS label-distribution protocol (LDP) also permits Qualityof-Service (QoS) attributes to be specied. Thus, one can use MPLS to set up a virtual private network (VPN) with explicit routes and bandwidth guarantees. MPLS has received broad support from equipment vendors and service providers, and is expected to become a major protocol for supporting trac engineering in a high-speed network. One of the main issues in trac engineering is how to set up the explicit routes so that the utilizations of network resources are optimized. This can be stated more precisely as an optimization problem where the physical topology and the average trac intensities between all nodes of the network are given, and we have to determine explicit routes between end nodes so that a pre-dened objective is optimized. One such objective is to minimize the maximum link utilization. The objective assures that there would be no under-utilization as well as no over-utilization of network resources. Trac bifurcation, i.e., multipath routing, makes the trac engineering problem more realizable. While splitting the trac among dierent

paths makes the network more load balanced, simultaneously it creates a bigger challenge to nd optimum paths and trac-splitting ratios among dierent paths to achieve the trac engineering objective. We investigate this problem under a dynamic scenario in Chapter 2. To appreciate the existing literature on multipath bandwidth provisioning, we conduct a comprehensive study of the eld in Chapter 2.

1.4

Network Engineering (Upgradation)

A Network Engineering (NE) method determines the network resources (including their amount, location, etc.) to meet the desired network performance for a given trac growth pattern while minimizing cost. More precisely and in a practical sense, network engineering evaluates the trac growth model and current network resources, and then it suggests to the network operator how to employ resources (i.e., upgrade the network) over a period of time (typically six months or one year) so that the users trac demands can be satised at minimum additional cost and revenue can be maximized. With the explosive growth of the Internet, we are seeing an enormous growth in network trac. Internet trac has been doubling every few months and this trend appears to continue for a while. To satisfy the increasing demands from various types of customers, it is very important for the network operator to continuously upgrade its network resources. There are fundamentally three ways of increasing transmission capacity, namely, 1) Space-Division Multiplexing (SDM), where bit rates remain the same but additional bers are deployed to increase capacity, 2) Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM), where transmission rates are increased by upgraded line cards with higher bit rates, and 3) WavelengthDivision Multiplexing (WDM), where more wavelengths are used over existing bers.

The SDM approach is straightforward, but it has several drawbacks. It requires more bers, which may not be very cost eective (per-mile ber installation in the US costs roughly $100K US dollars). Both TDM and WDM has their own pros and cons. One approach might be more suitable than the other depending on which part of the network needs to be upgraded. The TDM approach requires the bit rate on the ber to be increased to 10, 40 Gbps or beyond. Electric TDM technology already delivers the capability to reach 40 Gbps and may grow to 100 Gbps in near future. However, at higher bit rates, it has to deal with more severe transmission impairments over the ber, specically chromatic dispersion, polarization-mode dispersion, and ber nonlinearities. Thus, it is often preferable to maintain a modest transmission rate or a mix of bit rates (i.e., 10, 40, and/or 100 Gbps) and run multiple wavelengths over the ber. Hence, the WDM approach is a more practical option for core optical networks. Apart from this, the transmission capacity can be increased in a modular manner by adding more wavelengths when capacity increase is required. It can also save huge up-front capital expenditure which is required for the other approaches. Moreover, WDM systems can be designed to be transparent systems that allow dierent wavelengths to carry data at dierent bit rates. Such an approach is explored in Chapter 3 and 4 by proposing several upgrade methods. However, upgrading network capacity in an access network by employing WDM approaches might not be viable from an economic perspective. While the WDM solution has the potential to provide a higher aggregated capacity than TDM technology, this does not necessarily guarantee better service quality or network utilization. The virtue of sharing, which is the underlying principle of TDM technology, not only drastically reduces the cost of bandwidth and equipment, but also signicantly improves

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user experience. Chapter 5 makes the case for TDM technology in the access part of the telecom network hierarchy. Performance of such a standardized technology, namely, 10G EPON, is explored in Chapter 6.

1.5

Organization

This dissertation is organized as follows. In Chapter 2, we investigate degraded-service-aware multipath bandwidth provisioning in an optical WDM mesh network that supports trafc grooming (where variable-bit-rate connections are supported through TDM on each WDM channel). We show how multipath provisioning can balance the network load. We also show that the scheme performs significantly better than conventional single-path and multipath provisioning methods. This work was presented at the Optical Fiber Communications Conference (OFC), March 2008 [5]. Chapter 3 investigates network engineering by proposing a new parameter called exhaustion probability of a network cut. We also propose an ecient procedure to calculate a lower bound on the exhaustion probability of a network cut. Our solution can be applied to a network upgrade problem, and it is independent of any routing algorithm. This work has appeared in the IEEE/OSA Journal of Optical Communications and Networking (JOCN), June 2010 [6]. Parts of this work was presented at the International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN), August 2008 [7] and European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC), September 2008 [8]. In Chapter 4, we propose ecient network upgrade mechanisms to meet both the Internet Service Providers (ISP) and the network operators needs. Mathematical model as well as heuristic approaches are given to achieve highly-available network upgrading. Various practical aspects such as volume discount and CAPEX depreciation factor are considered

11

for a practical case study. Also, several aspects of multi-period upgrading vs. single-period (one-shot) upgrading are studied. This work is under review by IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, after presentation at the IEEE/OSA Optical Fiber Communications Conference (OFC), March 2009 [9]. Chapter 5 performs a comparative study of the most prominent broadband technologies, namely TDM PON (Time-Division Multiplexed Passive Optical Network) and WDM PON (Wavelength-Division Multiplexed Passive Optical Network), and reports on their performance through simulation. It makes the case that, while WDM PON has the potential to provide a higher aggregated capacity than TDM PON, this does not necessarily guarantee better service quality or network utilization. This work is under review by IEEE Communications Magazine for possible publication in its February 2011 issue. In Chapter 6, we discuss the performance of 10G-EPON transmission overhead for both downstream and upstream channels. The analysis was carried out for practical deployment scenarios and veried by theoretical results as well. This work is under submission to IEEE Communications Magazine, after presentation at the IEEE 3rd International Symposium on Advanced Networks and Telecommunication Systems (ANTS), December 2009 [10]. Finally, Chapter 7 concludes the dissertation with a summary of the results.

12

Chapter 2
Degraded-Service-Aware Multipath Provisioning
2.1 Introduction

In this chapter, we consider dynamic bandwidth provisioning according to a Service Level Agreement (SLA) in a telecom backbone mesh network employing optical WDM technology. While achieving low congestion and optimizing the utilization of network resources are major objectives, simultaneously satisfying SLA requirements to avoid any penalty (which is usually the case if a SLA requirement is not met) is also an important objective. Multipath provisioning is a potential technology that can be exploited to satisfy all of these objectives. In a next-generation SONET/SDH network, multipath routing can be achieved by using virtual concatenation (VCAT) and link-capacity adjustment scheme (LCAS) [3]. VCAT is an inverse-multiplexing technique that groups an arbitrary number of SONET/SDH containers, which may not be contiguous, to create a lager container. A network operator can combine any number of either low-order (VT1.5s/VT2s in SONET) or high-order (STS-1s/STS-3cs in SONET) containers, depending on the switching granularity, to create a VCAT group. Each group member can be routed independently and they can be combined at the destination

13

node; as a result, VCAT enables the operator to carry a single connection over multiple paths. Thus, we focus on a next-generation SONET/SDHover-WDM network, although our work is generally applicable to a WDM mesh network with trac grooming and trac bifurcation. We exploit VCAT/LCAS technology to shape the trac in such a way that network resources can be maximally utilized and simultaneously several reliability issues can be addressed by supporting degraded service (vs. no service at all in case of a network element failure). Multipath routing has been investigated by prior researchers and a comprehensive survey of the existing literature is reported in Section 2.2. In [11], the authors investigate the trac-provisioning problem using a linear programming (LP) formulation. They show that trac bifurcation, i.e., multipath routing, can give an optimum solution. However, they address a static scenario where all trac demands are known in advance. In [12] and [13], survivable multipath provisioning has been addressed. The authors use eective multipath bandwidth and intra-VCG (Virtual Concatenation Group) backup sharing, respectively, to minimize resource overbuild. Dierential-Delay-Constrained (DDC) multipath routing has been addressed in [14]. However, trac engineering (where link loads are properly balanced) has not been considered in these approaches. We address both reliability and trac engineering issues together. The rest of this chapter is organized as follows. In Section 2.2, a comprehensive literature survey on multipath routing is provided. In Section 2.3, the trac engineering problem is formulated. Section 2.4 describes our approach to multipath provisioning. Section 2.5 compares the performance of dierent schemes using illustrative examples. Section 2.6 concludes the chapter.

14

2.2

Related Work

Multipath bandwidth provisioning in high-speed telecom networks is a relatively new area of research. This technology can be exploited to achieve trac engineering as well as reliable provisioning, as well as enabling security in communications. While opening new dimensions in high-speed networking, it also introduces newer challenges. For example, dierential delay caused by multipath routing has to be compensated for at the destination node. Some research has also been done on this topic. We conduct a comprehensive study of the existing literature on multipath routing in high-speed telecom mesh networks to appreciate the progress in this eld. We categorize various research eorts, and focus our research attention on open research problems. Multipath routing can be broadly categorized in two domains, namely WDM optical-layer approaches (i.e., routing and bandwidth allocation) and packet-layer (TCP and IP layers) approaches (i.e., routing only). While there is signicant overlap in the objectives of these two approaches, they are generally dierent in technology and applicability.

2.2.1

Routing and Bandwidth Allocation (Circuit Layer)

In the domain of WDM optical-layer approaches, research has been done in static trac settings, where a trac demand matrix is known in advance, as well as in dynamic settings, where trac (connections) arrive one at a time, holds for a certain time, and then departs, i.e., there is no knowledge of future trac demands. 1. Static Settings: Under static trac settings, the work in [11] investigates the trac provisioning problem using a linear programming (LP) formulation. The authors show that trac bifurcation, i.e., multipath routing,

15

can achieve an optimum bandwidth provisioning using minimum network resources while balancing loads on dierent links. In [15], the authors have extended the work in [11] to show that, by using the duality of the LP formulation, the link weights can be obtained which results in an optimal routing under the assumption of arbitrary trac splitting across Equal-Cost Multiple Paths (ECMP). This is an important result because, for a linear objective function, any optimal routing for minimum resource usage can be implemented using the existing shortest-path routing. The key contribution of this work is to demonstrate that the trac-bifurcation LP problem can be transformed into the shortest-path problem by adjusting link weights. In [16], the authors extend the LP objective function of [11, 15] to minimize the total trac volume on the network. From a broad perspective, the works in [11, 15, 16] have addressed the general trac engineering problem but do not consider dierential delay or reliability issues. 2. Dynamic Settings: Under dynamic trac settings, several issues of multipath routing have been considered by various researchers. First, we summarize the approaches where trac engineering, i.e., load balancing, issues have not been addressed. (a) Congestion-Unaware Approaches: In [12], reliable multipath bandwidth provisioning has been addressed by proposing a new metric, called eective multipath bandwidth. This approach takes link availabilities into account and allocates extra bandwidth, if necessary, to meet the availability requirement. The work has been extended in [17] by

16

considering min-cost ow analysis. Survivable bandwidth provisioning can also be achieved by using backup protection. In [13], the authors investigate survivable multipath provisioning with the objective of minimizing resource overbuild (RO) which is the extra resources needed for protection. The proposed solutions use intra-VCG (Virtual Concatenation Group) backup sharing. The authors of [18] also investigate the problem of minimizing resource overbuild for dedicated protection (where resources are reserved prior to fault occurrences). They captured the idea of degraded service provisioning (where a certain amount of trac is guaranteed to be supported even in case of a failure). However, trac engineering (load balancing) issues have not been considered in the above approaches. In multipath routing, dierent paths of a single connection may take dierent amount of time to reach the destination, which causes dierential delay. This dierential delay (DD), which is limited by the end nodes delay-compensation capability, can impact the service if DD is not accounted for properly in the routing. DD-constrained multipath routing has been investigated in [14, 19]. In [14], the authors have also captured survivability issues of multipath routing. (b) Congestion-Aware Approaches: We investigate multipath provisioning in telecom mesh networks [5]. The objectives are to minimize link loads and support degraded service, namely guarantee a fraction of the requested bandwidth even in case of a link failure. In other words, we address multipath provisioning from a trac-engineering perspective while considering reliability issues.

17

2.2.2

Routing-Only Approaches (Packet Layer)

This broad category, namely, packet-layer approaches, has been investigated from two perspectives: 1) End-to-End Delay-Aware Routing and 2) Congestion-Aware Routing. 1. End-to-End Delay-Aware Routing: The authors of [20] have investigated the problem of ow and capacity assignment of individual links subject to a cost constraint so that the network-wide average packet delay can be minimized. They show that there is no closed-form solution for this problem and propose a ow deviation algorithm that solves the problem near optimally. In [21], the authors developed a distributed computation framework for multipath routing that guarantees minimum average delay, assuming stationary inputs and links. Also, the routing algorithm needs to start with an initial loop-free set. While the proof assumes innitely divisible trac, it remains to be seen how this will operate with coarser granularity ows. The optimal routing algorithm of [21] is extremely dicult if not impossible to implement in real networks because of its stationary or quasi-static assumptions and the requirement of the knowledge of global constants. In [22], a simpler algorithm is proposed that can achieve nearoptimal routing. The impact of granularity on network and routing behavior is studied in [23]. The authors noted that, while ner granularity improved network performance, this does not carry over when routing updates are made at smaller time scales. Finer granularities also imply higher classication/processing complexity at nodes/ingress that results in more expensive packet forwarding. 2. Congestion-Aware Routing:

18

In [24], the authors describe briey a multipath routing scheme for dynamic network scenario which has been considered for connectionoriented, high-speed networks. The fundamental objective of the scheme is to bridge the gap between routing and congestion control as the network becomes congested. The proposed routing scheme works as a shortest-path-rst (minimum-hop) algorithm under current network conditions. However, as the shortest path becomes congested, the source node uses multiple paths if and when available in order to distribute the load and reduce packet loss. In [25], to address the eciency and stability challenges of loadsensitive routing, the authors introduce a new hybrid approach that performs dynamic routing of long-lived ows, while forwarding short-lived ows on static pre-provisioned paths. By relating the detection of long-lived ows to the timescale of link-state-update messages in the routing protocol, route stability is considerably improved. However, the ow trigger is considered only under the static network provisioning policy. A dynamic multipath routing (DMRP) scheme to improve resource utilization of a network carrying real-time trac by re-routing ongoing connections through shorter routes is proposed in [26]. This approach alleviates instantaneous congestion by allowing rerouting of a call through a longer route. This leads to a gain in network eciency in terms of reduced delay for a given resource utilization (or alternatively, reduced resource utilization for a given delay). A comprehensive categorization of dierent approaches in multipath bandwidth provisioning is given in Figs. 2.1 and 2.2.

19

2.3

Problem Formulation

A trac engineering problem can be stated as provisioning connections between the network nodes to satisfy the trac demands while optimizing the network resources. As described in [11], one of the primary objective of a network operator is to minimize the maximum link utilization to properly distribute the load throughout the network. Our solution tries to achieve the same objective while provisioning connections. However, to capture the practical trac engineering problem, we focus our attention on the following dynamic trac model: connection requests arrive independently over time, each holds for a certain period of time, and then is released; in addition, each connection has its own bandwidth requirement. In other words, we do not know about future trac demands. It is also important to guarantee some level of service in case of a failure of a network element instead of no service at all. So, in our model, any trac demand will also request a certain amount of degraded service, which is the amount of trac that is guaranteed to be supported even in case of a failure. For example, a request will come in the form < s, d, B, >, where s is the source node, d is the destination node, B is the requested bandwidth, and is the requested degraded service, i.e., in case of a failure, fraction of the requested bandwidth should be guaranteed (typical values of may be 0.3, 0.5, 0.7, etc.). It should be noted that the maximum that a customer may request is limited by the topology of the network as well as the maximum degree of the source and the destination. For any source (s) or destination (d) which has a maximum of n links connected to it, we can support a maximum of ( n1 )n degraded service between that (s, d) pair for a single link failure unless over provisioning is allowed. We model the network as a weighted, directed graph G = (V, E, C, ),

20

where V is the set of nodes, E is the set of unidirectional bers (referred to as links), C : E Z + is the cost function for each link (i, j) (where Z denotes the set of positive numbers; typically C represents ber lease cost or operational cost and is proportional to length of ber. In our study we considered distance between two nodes as the cost of provisioning unit bandwidth between those two nodes. However, the formulation is applicable for a dierent cost model as well.), and : E Z + species the capacity of each link. While satisfying the stated objectives, our scheme will provision any request < s, d, B, > dynamically over multiple paths if the network condition (state) permits B amount of ow from s to d. We need to determine
k k the ratios Xij , where Xij is the fraction of the requested bandwidth for

the k th path over any link (i,j), so that the network-wide maximum link utilization is minimized and the degraded service requirement for the connection is met.

2.4

Heuristic: Degraded-Service-Aware Multipath Provisioning (DSAMP)

Our proposed heuristic algorithm to solve this problem is called DSAMP (Degraded-Service-Aware Multipath Provisioning), and it has two steps as follows.

2.4.1

Discovery of Routes

For an incoming request between a (s,d) pair, we rst compute a set of suitable paths (which may or may not be link disjoint). These paths will have a cost constraint, where a suitable path has a cost no more than a certain factor (called relaxF actor) of the cost of the minimum-cost path currently available for the (s,d) pair. The motivation is to diversify the trac as much as possible. But, while a single path is not suitable for proper load balancing, simultaneously taking several long path may in-

21

troduce extra trac in the network, causing faster exhaustion of network resources. To balance both objectives, we restrict our path selection by a cost constraint. Our Algorithm 1 (Algorithm 3) can nd a set of nondisjoint paths (one path in each iteration) over which a connection can be provisioned. Algorithm 1 Multipath computation algorithm.
1: G null 2: Find path p with minimum cost (e.g. using Dijkstras) 3: G G e | e p 4: relaxedCost relaxF actor minCost 5: G = G - e | e p and weight of edge e is minimum 6: totalBW maxow(G ) (returns the possible maximum ow between

source and destination on graph G )

7: while totalBW < requestedBW or cost < relaxedCost do 8: 9: 10: 11:

nd new shortest path p in G, cost cost of p G G e | e p totalBW maxow(G ) G = G - e | e p and weight of edge e is minimum

12: end while

Algorithm 1 is bound to terminate within | E | iterations, where E is the set of links. At each iteration, if we nd a path within the restricted cost, then we delete the edge which belongs to the path with minimum cost from the graph. Thus, when we nd a path p, we either stop on an iteration so that the connection can be provisioned or keep on exhausting the graph by deleting at least one edge from the graph.

2.4.2

Bandwidth Allocation

This step calculates the appropriate bandwidth ratios on the dierent paths found in the previous step (namely Discovery of Routes) with the

22

objective of minimizing the maximum incremental link utilization, where incremental link utilization is dened as the sum of the bandwidths of the dierent multipaths (of this connection) over the available capacity of the link. If we can satisfy this objective, it will distribute the trac throughout the network according to the individual available link capacities. We formulate this problem as a Linear Program (LP). Let K be the set of paths computed by Algorithm 1, and let t represent the maximum incremental link utilization dened by Eqn. (2.1).
k k Our objective is to compute the variables Xij (where Xij is the part of the

requested bandwidth B on the k th path (k K) over link (i, j) and cij is the available capacity on link (i, j)) such that the maximum incremental link utilization is minimized which is given by Eqn. (2.1). Equations (2.2) to (2.3) are the constraints. Equation (2.2) states that the total bandwidth demand should be met. Equation (2.3) restricts the link-capacity utilization to the currently available capacity cij . Note that, in our Algorithm 1, if we restrict the number of paths to one (i.e., one iteration), then it leads to single-path routing; and if we set relaxF actor = 1 (see Algorithm 1), then it will turn into conventional multipath routing (as in [12]). Now, let us dene a ow between a source-destination pair (s, d) as -disjoint if any link in the network accommodates no more than (1 ) fraction of the total ow between the (s, d) pair. If we can provision a connection as a -disjoint ow, then the connection will support degraded service in case of a single link failure. We have incorporated this idea in our LP formulation with Constraint (2.5).
k Xij kK

t = max
(i,j)E

cij

(2.1)

minimize t such that

23

kK

k Xij = B, (i, j) E

(2.2)

kK

k Xij cij , (i, j) E

(2.3)

kK

k Xij (1 ) B

(2.4)

2.5

Illustrative Numerical Examples

To study the performance of our degraded-service-aware multipath bandwidth provisioning (DSAMP) algorithm, we simulate a dynamic network environment. The connection arrival process is Poisson and the connection holding time follows a negative exponential distribution with a normalized unit mean. The degraded service parameter is uniformly distributed among (0.3, 0.5, 0.7). The capacity of each wavelength is OC 192 (10 Gbps). The connection requests follow the bandwidth distribution 100M : 150M : 600M : 1G : 2.5G : 5G : 10G = 50 : 20 : 10 : 10 : 4 : 2 : 1 (which is typical in a practical network). Connection requests are uniformly distributed over all node pairs. Distance among the nodes are used as the cost metric. The example network used in our study is a US nationwide network topology with 16 wavelengths per ber (Fig. 2.3). To appreciate the performance of our scheme, we also simulated the single-path and conventional multipath provisioning schemes [12] (as described before). As these schemes cannot support degraded service, to make a fair comparison, we consider Constraint (5) separately with our scheme. We simulated 100, 000 connections for each scheme and solved the LP (for our approach) using CPLEX. Figure 2.4 shows that the fraction of connections unprovisioned is lowered by our approach relative to the other two approaches. Correspondingly, Fig. 2.5 shows the fraction of bandwidth unprovisioned.

24

To observe how degraded service provisioning aects the performance, we test our scheme with and without Constraint (2.5). Figure 2.6 shows that, except for low loads, Constraint (2.5) does not aect the performance of our scheme. This result is expected as our scheme diversies the trac from the beginning and it naturally gives the potential to support degraded service.

2.6

Conclusion

We have investigated degraded-service-aware multipath bandwidth provisioning in an optical WDM mesh network which supports trac grooming. We have shown how multipath provisioning can balance the network load. We showed that the scheme performs signicantly better than conventional single-path and multipath provisioning.

Multipath Bandwidth Provisioning

WDM Optical layer Approaches

Packet layer approaches

Dynamic Settings

Static Settings

Next Page

Explicit Routing for Traffic Engineering (Yufei Wang et al. ICCCN99)

Congestion Unaware

Congestion Aware

Pre-Planned Global Rerouting for Fault management in WDM Network (Jing Zhang et al. JSAC07 )

Reliable

Unreliable

Reliable

DDC Unaware
Backup based

DDC Aware

DDC Aware

Link availabilities based

Degraded-Service-Aware Multipath Provisioning in Telecom Mesh Networks (Rajesh Roy et al. OFC'08) Our Work

Figure 2.1: Multipath routing: classication chart 1.

Survivable Multipath routing with Intra-VCG Shared Protection (Canhui Ou et al. TON06)
PESO: Low Overhead Protection for Ethernet-overSONET Transport (Swarup Acharya et al. INFOCOM04)

Reliable Multipath Provisioning (Smita Rai et al. TON07)

A Better Approach to Reliable Multipath Provisioning. (Ananya Das et al. GLOBECOM07)

Survivable, Differential Delay Constraint (DDC) Multipath Provisioning (Sheng Huang et al. OFC07)

Differential Delay Aware Routing for Ethernet-overSONET/SDH (Anurag Srivastava et al. INFOCOM04)

25

Multipath Bandwidth Provisioning

WDM Optical layer Approaches Packet Layer Approaches

Previous Page

End-to-End Delay Aware Routing

Congestion Aware Routing

A Minimum Delay Routing Algorithm Using Distributed Computation (Robert Gallager et al. TOC77)

Dynamic Multi-Path Routing and how it Compares with other Dynamic Routing Algorithms for High Speed Wire Area Networks (Saewoong Bahk et al. SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review92)

A Simple Approximation to MinimumDelay Routing (Srinivas Vutukury et al. SIGCOM99)

Load-Sensitive Routing for Long-Lived IP Flows (Anees Shaikh et al. SIGCOMM99)

Figure 2.2: Multipath routing: classication chart 2.

On the Impact of Aggregation on the Performance of Traffic Aware Routing (Sridharan Bhattacharyya et al. Teletraffic Congress01)

Dynamic Multipath Routing (DMPR): An Approach to Improve Resource Utilization in Networks for Real -Time Traffic Swades De et al. Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems, 2001

26

27

Figure 2.3: Sample network topology.

0.6

Conventional Single path Conventional Multipath

0.5

Multipath by LP (our approach)

Fraction of Unprovisioned Connections

0.4

0.3

0.2

0.1

0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 500 550 600

Load (In Erlangs)

Figure 2.4: Fraction of connections unprovisioned.

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0.7 Conventional Single Path

Fraction of Unprovisioned Bandwidth

Conventional Multipath 0.6 Multipath by LP (our approach)

0.5

0.4

0.3

0.2

0.1

0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 500 550 600

Load (in Erlangs)

Figure 2.5: Fraction of bandwidth unprovisioned.

0.45 Multipath with Guaranteed Degraded Service 0.4 Multipath without Guaranteed Degraded Service

Fraction of Unprovisioned Connections

0.35

0.3

0.25

0.2

0.15

0.1

0.05

0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 500 550 600

Load (in Erlangs)

Figure 2.6: Eect of degraded-service provisioning.

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Chapter 3
Telecom Mesh Network Upgrade to Manage Trac Growth
3.1 Introduction

As trac volume in our backbone networks continues to grow substantially, particularly due to new video-enabled applications, we need to not only employ ecient trac engineering methods to utilize the existing network resources optimally, but also we need to periodically upgrade the network to meet the increasing trac demands. A simplied viewpoint of Network Engineering (NE) is to put the bandwidth where the trac is" (vs. Trac Engineering (TE) whose objective is to put the trac where the bandwidth is") [27]. Thus, NE deals with the network upgrade problem, in which trac (e.g., lightpath connection requests in an optical WDM network) arrives, holds for a while, and then leaves the network, but the overall trac intensity on the network continues to grow with time. Determining which part of the network is heading towards capacity exhaust and needs to be upgraded is an important Network Engineering problem. Our Network Engineering approach is applicable to any telecom network. However, in this study, we mainly focus on an optical WDM mesh network which is the dominant telecom mesh network. From the per-

30

spective of a WDM optical network, a network upgrade means incremental addition to the number of wavelengths on the WDM links, Optical Crossconnects (OXC), as well as the number of interface cards supported by an OXC. It should be noted that the costs of these equipment are on the order of hundreds to thousands of dollars, so serious attention should be given to determine the optimum amount of investment as well as their specic locations of resource deployment to minimize the network cost while satisfying all the trac. A typical Network Engineering method calculates the steady-state connection blocking probabilities to predict the future upgrade of network resources. In circuit-switched networks, several other methods are proposed in the literature [2830]. Many methods are based on mathematical models with cost minimization as the objective, which turn out to be nonlinear optimization problems with a large number of variables and nonlinear constraints. Computational complexities and relative merits for dierent models are discussed in [31], [32]. While it may be appropriate to design a packet-switched network (lossy network) with a certain packet-loss probability, it is not desirable to reject a high-speed connection request over an optical network. Noting the high bit rate, the longevity, and the revenue generated by provisioning a lightpath, a network operator should make every eort to satisfy such a connection request. Hence, it is very desirable to upgrade network resources periodically in order to accommodate all new requests. Noting that blocking probability is a steady-state parameter of a network, it is not appropriate to use blocking probability to dimension a network which goes through periodic upgrades (and never reaches steady state) to satisfy the growing trac demands. In [33], [34], the authors proposed exhaustion probability to address the NE problem. Exhaustion probability is dened as the probability that

31

at least one lightpath request will be rejected during a time period (0, T ) due to lack of capacity (i.e., bandwidth) on some link. In other words, it is the probability of rejecting a connection request, the rst such lost connection due to capacity exhaustion. In contrast (with exhaustion probability), the connection blocking probability is the probability of blocking a connection over a period of time. The concept can be further explained and emphasized by modelling a single network link by a general queue with capacity the same as that of the link. Connections can be provisioned by allocating capacity from the queue, and when a connection goes away, capacity can be freed again. A connection is blocked only when the queue is lled with all previous connections. Now, if the arrival rates and holding times are on the order of milliseconds or seconds and we can tolerate some amount of rejections, then the rate of rejecting connections (i.e., blocking) is a much more important parameter than the time of rst rejection. And this approach is well suited for a packet-switched access network (Erlang B formula is popularly used for such purposes). However, if we consider a core transport network where the connection arrival rates and holding times are on the order of several hours or days or months and rejecting connections may have signicant impact on overall revenue, then nding (or delaying) the time of rst rejection has more practical value than calculating merely the blocking probability. Getting back to our queue model, for such a transport network, it takes some time (usually months) to ll the queue and to start rejecting an arrival, and this time period has signicant impact on network dimensioning. To put this into perspective, if a network operator evaluates its network resources and nds out that the network will start to reject connections (say) in six months, then it should add new resources to the network around that time line. Thus, the concept of incremental growth is directly aligned with exhaustion

32

probability and diers from the concept of blocking probability which assumes the network will operate with the same capacity forever. The work in [33], [34] proposed a procedure to calculate exhaustion probabilities of dierent routes assuming xed routing and independent link-exhaustion probabilities. However, in a practical network, routing is dynamic and dependent on the current network state. Our work introduces the concept of network-cut exhaustion probability (or cut-exhaustion probability for short). A network cut is a partition of the vertex set of the network into any two sets. A cut can be determined by the set of arcs starting in one set and ending in the other. Networkcut exhaustion probability is dened as the probability that at least one lightpath request will be rejected during a time period (0, T ) due to lack of capacity on that cut. It is independent of particular routes chosen by connections, and hence it more accurately reects the NE problem, namely over what general set of links should more capacity be allocated so that new connections can be accepted, independent of routing. Again, a network deployment needs to support asymmetric growth as utilizations of some parts of the network grow faster than the others. Also some link of the network may become so critical that it can not tolerate any rejection (of a connection) while others can to some extent (because of alternate routing). To facilitate such asymmetric growth and to value the importance of links, we introduce the concept of r-drop cutexhaustion probability. Depending on the value of r, dierentiated growth can be achieved across the network. The rest of this chapter is organized as follows. Section 3.2 emphasizes the importance of network-cut analysis by illustrating a network design problem. Section 3.3 develops an ecient procedure to calculate the cut-exhaustion probability and presents some analytical results showing the characteristics of the proposed parameter under dierent

33

trac assumptions. Section 3.4 extends the concept of cut-exhaustion probability under a generic framework. A method to designate critical cuts in the network is proposed in Section 3.5. Section 3.6 presents several illustrative numerical examples to validate our NE approach. Section 3.7 concludes the chapter.

3.2

A Network-Cut Analysis

Let us consider a network design problem. We are given a network topology (e.g., Fig. 3.1) and a trac demand matrix (e.g., Table 3.1). We need to nd appropriate capacities on each link so that the trac demands can be satised and cost (in terms of network resources) can be minimized.

Cut

Figure 3.1: Example network with network cut.

We model the network as a directed graph G = (V, E, B), where V is

34

1 1 0 2 25 3 20 4 0

2 25 0 15 30

3 0 30 0 35

4 20 25 30 0

Table 3.1: Trac demand matrix. the set of nodes, E is the set of unidirectional bers (referred to as links, where we note that each link in Fig. 3.1 is a pair of bers running in opposite directions), and B : E Z + is the cost function for each link (i, j) (where Z + denotes the set of positive numbers representing distances among node pairs). A network cut is a partition of the vertex set V of the network into any two sets S and T . A cut can also be determined by the set of arcs starting in S (which includes the source node of a connection) and ending in T (which includes the terminating node of the connection). The capacity of a cut is the sum of the capacities on these arcs (xi,j ). Now, it can be observed that, given a (S, T ) cut and a set of trac demands (uv , where u S and v T ), the trac must cross through the cut (S, T ). In other words, the summation of all such trac demands gives a lower limit on the capacity of the cut (S, T ) in order to meet these demands. It should be noted that each cut is directed, so the vertex partitions S and T contribute to two cuts (S, T ) and (T, S), and capacity constraints should be met for both of them separately as nether capacities nor demands are symmetric. Heuristics are given in [35] and [36] to enumerate all the cuts of a network. For our example network, considering the cut (S = {1, 2}, T = {3, 4}) and the trac demands (u,v ), we get: x1,3 + x2,3 + x2,4 1,4 + 1,3 + 2,4 + 2,3 x3,1 + x3,2 + x4,2 3,1 + 3,2 + 4,1 + 4,2 (3.1) (3.2)

35

where xi,j is the capacity of the directed link(i, j). In general, for any cut (S, T ), the following capacity constraint need to be satised:
e<S,T > e<S,T >

C(e)

i|si Sti T

Di

(3.3)

where and

C(e) is the sum of capacities of the edges linking S to T Di is the sum of the demands whose source is in S and

i|si Sti T

destination is in T . For the example network and its demand matrix, some of the constraints are as follows (constraints for one direction of each cut is shown, while constraints for the other direction can be formulated similarly): x1,3 + x2,3 + x2,4 75 x1,2 + x3,2 + x3,4 90 x1,2 + x1,3 + x4,2 + x4,3 90 x1,3 + x1,2 45 x2,1 + x2,3 + x2,4 80 x3,1 + x3,2 + x3,4 65 x4,2 + x4,3 65 (3.4) (3.5) (3.6) (3.7) (3.8) (3.9) (3.10)

Now, the total capacity cost of the network can be computed as follows:
ij

xi,j bi,j

(3.11)

where bi,j is the cost of link(i, j) (Note that, we assume a linear cost per unit of bandwidth, though this is often not realistic). A network design problem involves determining the xi,j values with the objective of minimizing the value of Equation (3.11) subject to the the cut-capacity constraints (a few of which have been listed in Equations

36

(3.4) through (3.10)). These constraints are necessary, but may not be sucient. The above static network design problem gives us an insight on how cut analysis can be employed to determine individual link capacities while minimizing the total network cost. The capacity constraints on dierent cuts satisfy all trac demands. The concept can be further extended and capacity constraints are still applicable to the dynamic scenario where trac growth is considered. Now, exhaustion probability (more precisely the probability that capacity will not be exhausted) of a network cut gives us a probabilistic estimate that network resources will not be exhausted over a period of time. In other words, limiting the exhaustion probabilities of dierent cuts within certain desired values, by considering future trac growth, ensures the resource availabilities to satisfy trac demands. In this study, our objective is to nd the set of critical cuts that characterize an existing network and also to evaluate them in order to nd the possibilities of capacity exhaustion of these cuts.

3.3

Computing Cut-exhaustion Probability

The exhaustion probability of a network cut can be computed by transient analysis of a Markov chain. We use a simple network transformation where a cut can be represented by a virtual link. For a given cut C(S, T ), all edges out of S are connected to a new virtual node R and all edges into set T will come from another new virtual node R . Virtual nodes R and R are connected by a new virtual edge e. To calculate the exhaustion probability of cut C(S, T ), we have to calculate the exhaustion probability of virtual link e. A cut-to-link transformation example is shown in Fig. 3.2. Note that, for any cut C(S, T ), there are two types of trac i,j that

37

C(S, T) 2 3

C(S, T) 2 3

Figure 3.2: A cut-to-link transformation.

cross the edges of the cut. For any i,j , where i S and j T , the trac must cross the cut to reach its destination. But, if i, j S or i, j T , then the trac may or may not cross the cut (depending on the routing of the i,j trac, which in turn may depend on route optimality and current network state). In addition, the i,j trac, where i S and j T , may zig-zag" across the cut more than once, again depending on routing. In our analysis below, we ignore these types of trac (because they require more detailed routing knowledge), and we only consider those trac where i S and j T . As a result, our analysis gives a lower bound on the actual exhaustion probability. Let us consider N to be the capacity of the cut C(S, T ) (which is edge e in the transformed network). Also, trac arrivals (lightpaths in our

38

case) are Poisson with (t) as the state-independent arrival rate at time t. Holding times are assumed to be negative exponentially distributed with mean
1 .

The busy-wavelength distribution can be modelled by a

birth-death process where a state of the Markov chain represents the number of lightpaths (in general, the units of trac) in progress. The birth-death model with the above assumptions is shown in Fig. 3.3.

Figure 3.3: Markov chain of the busy-wavelength distribution over a network cut.

Let Pn (t) be the probability of the system being in state n at time t. Then, we can establish the relations between the state probabilities at time t as follows [37]:
Pn (t) = ((t) + n)Pn (t) + (t)Pn1 (t) + (n + 1)Pn+1 (t),

(3.12)

(for 1 n N 1)
P0 (t) = (t)P0 (t) + P1 (t) PN (t) = ((t) + N )PN (t) + (t)PN 1 (t) PN +1 (t) = (t)PN (t)

(3.13) (3.14) (3.15)

where the initial condition is:

Pi (0) = 1, Pn (0) = 0 f or n = i. (3.16)

Designating i (which represents the number of lightpaths established) as initial state, Pi (0) represents the probability of being in state i at time t = 0. For an existing network, the value of i is more than zero (i = 1, 2, ..., N ), but for a new network, i = 0. Note that the states 0, 1, ..., N are transient states and the state N + 1 is an absorbing state from which no exit is possible. The capacity of

39

the cut will be exhausted if N wavelengths are busy and another arrival occurs. Hence, PN +1 (t) is the network-cut exhaustion probability at time t. For our purposes, month is an appropriate time unit since we are considering long lived connections. We have computed the exhaustion probability PN +1 (t) by numerical methods using a First-Order Dierential Equation (ODE) solver (MATLAB). Now, we present some numerical results of cut-exhaustion probability considering dierent trac models. Figures 3.4(a) and 3.4(b) show exhaustion probabilities of a cut of total capacity 32 units under linear and exponential trac growth functions, respectively, with = 1 (i.e., holding time is normalized to a mean of unity). In both cases, we consider initial trac as 0 , and (t) = 0 (1 + t/ ) and (t) = 0 (1 + d(1 exp(t/ ))), respectively, are the time-dependent trac demands at time t. and d are two constants, which can be used to control growth rates. With a decreasing value of , the growth rate become higher; as a result, the cut gets exhausted sooner than the case where the growth rate is lower. It can be observed that the exhaustion probability increases sharply after a certain time period and eventually reaches 1. In other words, after a certain time, the chance that the cut will get exhausted becomes very high. As a result, a network operator should put more resources before that time period to avoid any possible connection rejection. Similar results have been reported in [33], [34] for single-hop route-exhaustion probabilities.

3.4 r-Drop Cut-Exhaustion Probability

The concept of cut-exhaustion probability explained in the previous sections can be extended over the scenario where we want to compute the probability of rejecting r consecutive connection requests. Thus, r-drop cut-exhaustion probability is dened as the probability that at least r

40

N = 32, = (1+t/), = 12, = 1, = n *

0 0 0 n

0.8

Exhaustion Probability

0.6

0.4

0.2

=2 =4 =8 = 16
0 5 10 15 20 25

Time t (month)

(a) Linear trac growth.

N = 32, = 0(1+d(1e 1
t/

), 0 = 2, d = 18, 0 = 1, n = n * 0

0.8 Exhaustion Probability

0.6

0.4

0.2

=2 =4 =8 = 16 5 10 Time t (month) 15 20 25

0 0

(b) Exponential trac growth.

Figure 3.4: Cut-exhaustion probability under dierent trac-growth models.

41

consecutive connection requests will be rejected during a time period (0, T ) due to lack of capacity on that cut. The idea behind this parameter is that the rejection of several consecutive connections indicates a severe resource crunch and appropriate action should be taken in order to stabilize the network to its normal operation. A higher value of r indicates a more severe condition of the network. It should be noted that, in our previous discussion, we have analyzed 1-drop cut-exhaustion probability, which is a specic case of r-drop cut-exhaustion probability. Dimensioning the network based on 1-drop cut-exhaustion probability can lead to over-investment on network resources even though the network can tolerate a few occasional connection rejections. In such scenarios, dimensioning the network based on r-drop cut-exhaustion probability (where the value of r is more than 1) can potentially save a signicant amount of upfront investment. However, critical parts of the network, which can not tolerate any rejection at all, should be dimensioned by considering the 1-drop cut-exhaustion probability. We model the r-drop cut-exhaustion probability by extending our Markov chain for the 1-drop case, where the (N+r)th state is an absorbing state and represents r consecutive connection drops. States N + 1, N + 2, ..., N + r 1 represent 1, 2, ..., r 1 consecutive connection drops, respectively, while the system has N connections in service. Whenever the system stays in one of these states and one wavelength becomes free again, the system transitions to the (N 1)th state. We need to calculate the probability of the system being in (N+r)th state, which is the r-drop cut-exhaustion probability according to our denition. With appropriate modications, the new Markov chain is shown in Fig. 3.5. The relations between the state probabilities can be computed similarly as before, namely:
Pn (t) = ((t) + n)Pn (t) + (t)Pn1 (t) + (n + 1)Pn+1 (t),

(3.17)

42

Figure 3.5: r-drop Markov chain of the busy-wavelength distribution over a network cut. (t) (t) ((t) + ) 0 (t) . . . . . . 0 0
0 0 0 . . . 0 0 0 0 0 . . . 0 0

.. . .. .

0 0 0 . . . (N 1) ((t) + (N 1)) (t) 0 . . . 0 0

0 0 0 . . . 0 N

.. .

0 0 0 . . . 0 N 0

0 . . . 0 0
0 0

((t) + N ) (t) . . . 0 0

0 0 . . .. . . . . . ((t) + N ) 0
(t) 0

Figure 3.6: Time-varying (N + r + 1) (N + r + 1) matrix A(t).

(for 1 n N 2)
P0 (t) = (t)P0 (t) + P1 (t) PN 1 (t) = ((t) + N )PN 1 (t) + (t)PN 2 (t) + N Pn (t) = ((t) + N )Pn (t) + (t)Pn1 (t), r1 i=0

(3.18) PN +i (t) (3.19) (3.20)

(for N n N + r 1)
PN +r (t) = (t)PN +r1 (t)

(3.21)

where the initial condition is: Pi (0) = 1, Pn (0) = 0 f or n = i. (3.22)

Let us dene A(t) as in Fig. 3.6, where A(t) is a time-varying (N + r +

43

1) (N + r + 1) matrix. Also dene P(t) as: { }T P(t) = P0 (t) P1 (t) P2 (t) PN +r (t)

(3.23)

Then, the set of Equations (3.17)-(3.21) can be expressed as P (t) = A(t)P(t). The set of dierential equations, characterized by co-ecient matrix A(t) along with initial condition vector P(0), gives a unique solution for P(t) at time t. A(t) is a general co-ecient matrix which can also represent the set of Equations (??)-(??) with the value r = 1. We solved P (t) = A(t)P(t) numerically for PN +r (t) using the same approach taken in the previous section. In Fig. 3.7(a), r-drop cut-exhaustion probability is shown for dierent values of r under constant trac ( = 25) and for a cut of capacity N = 32. It can be observed that, if the cut needs to be operated under 0.1 exhaustion probability and r = 1, then, after 2.5 months, the network operator needs to upgrade the capacity of the cut. On the other hand, to maintain the same exhaustion probability but considering r = 4, i.e., the system can tolerate 4 consecutive connection drops, then it needs to be upgraded after 4.5 months which is almost twice that of the previous time duration. As a result, signicant upfront expenditure can be saved. Savings of similar magnitude can be achieved for linearly-growing trac (for similar setup as in Fig. 3.4(a)), as shown in Fig. 3.7(b).

3.5

Localizing Critical Cuts

It should be noted that the number of network cuts (O(2|V | ), where | V | is the number of nodes) grows exponentially with the number of nodes in the network. As a result, calculating exhaustion probabilities of all possible network cuts, even for a medium-sized network, may become impractical. The number of cuts that need to be evaluated can be reduced by considering only the bottleneck cuts. A straightforward approach to iden-

44

1 r=1 r=2 r=3 r=4 r=5 r=6

0.9

N = 32, = 25

0.8

0.7

Exhaustion Probability

0.6

0.5

0.4

0.3

0.2

0.1

10

15

20

25

Time t (month)

(a) Constant trac.

rdrop Cutexhaustion Probability, N = 32, = 0(1+t/), 0 = 12, 0 = 1, n = n * 0 1

0.8

Exhaustion Probability

0.6

0.4

0.2 r=1 r=2 r=3 r=4 0 5 10 Time t (month) 15 20

(b) Linear trac growth.

Figure 3.7: r-drop cut-exhaustion probability under dierent trac growth models.

45

tify the bottleneck cuts is to localize all pair min cuts using the FordFulkerson algorithm or other well-known polynomial algorithms [38]. However, single-commodity min-cut is a coarse approximation of the bottleneck of a network and can be more accurately modelled by multicommodity ow formulation. It is possible to evaluate the grade of service of an existing network by examining only O(| V |2 ) cuts of the network. This set of cuts follows from the multicommodity ow problem formulation. In a multicommodity ow problem, there are k 1 commodities, each with its own source si , destination di , and demand Di for the ith s-d pair (1 i k). It can be observed that, in an optical mesh network, the connection provisioning problem is similar to the multicommodity ow problem, where we know the source-destination pair as well as the requested bandwidth between them. Here, the objective is to simultaneously route Di units of trac from si to di for all i so that the total amount of allocated bandwidth over any link is no greater than its capacity. We dene the critical cut of a multicommodity ow as the minimum (over all cuts) of the logarithm of the capacity over the demand of the cut. Formally, the critical cut is: = min log
U V

( C(U, U ) ) D(U, U )

(3.24)

where
e<U,U >

C(U, U ) =

C(e)

(3.25)

is the sum of capacities of the edges linking U and U and D(U, U ) =

i|si U ti U

Di

(3.26)

is the sum of the demands whose source and destination are on opposite sides of the cut that separates the node sets U from U . The maximum

46

ow between a source and destination pair is always upper bounded by the critical cut for any multicommodity ow problem. Irrespective of a particular routing algorithm, increasing trac always saturates the critical cut rst. In other words, the chance that the critical cut will get exhausted is highest compared to other cuts for a particular source-destination pair. As a result, the exhaustion probability of any cut is upper bounded by the exhaustion probability of these critical cuts. This observation leads us to the choice that, to evaluate the network, we only have to nd these critical cuts (O(| V |2 )) and calculate the corresponding exhaustion probabilities. In general, nding multicommodity ow critical cuts is a NP-hard problem [39]. However, for a practical-sized backbone network, the set of critical cuts can be obtained by intelligent search methods such as branch and bound. Heuristics are also available to identify such cuts [36]. In our simulation experiments, we employed signicant pruning of the search tree and found several such critical cuts in a reasonable amount of time.

3.6

Illustrative Numerical Examples

To better understand our network engineering approach, we simulate a dynamic network environment. The connection arrival process is Poisson and the connection holding time follows a negative exponential distribution with a normalized unit mean. Connection requests are uniformly distributed over all node pairs with uniform demands. The example network used in our study is a US nationwide network topology with 16 wavelengths per ber (Fig. 3.8). Also, all the results presented in this section are based on 1-drop cut-exhaustion probability. We provision all connection requests dynamically using shortest-path routing. In our rst set of experiments, we operate the network with constant trac in-

47

Cut C 2
6

19

Cut C 1
11 15 20

3 4

12

16 22

21

13 5 8 14 10

17

23

18

24

Figure 3.8: Sample network topology. tensity = 300 Erlang, which is a moderate trac load for this network setting. The steady-state blocking probability under these assumptions is 0.1635. To evaluate the network, we nd two multicommodity critical cuts using the method described in Section 3.5. Cuts C1 {(6, 11), (9, 11), (9, 12), (10, 13), (10, 14)} and C2 {(6, 11), (6, 9), (7, 9), (8, 10)} are shown in Fig. 3.8. We calculate both the analytical lower bound (LB) (using the set of Eqns. (3.12) (3.15)) and experimental exhaustion probability of the cuts (C1 and C2 ), as shown in Fig. 3.9. It can be observed that Eqns. (3.12) (3.15) put a lower bound on the experimental results. The exhaustion probability from our experiments is higher mainly due to the non-optimum routing of the shortest-path provisioning scheme. For the experimental setup, we assigned uniform capacity (16 wavelengths) on each link; however, the results show that, with such setup, the exhaustion probability of Cut C2 grows faster than Cut C1 . As a result, one needs to add more capacity on Cut C2 compared to Cut C1 . Hence, this induces asymmetric growth of the network over time, which is a practical issue for the network operator.

48

Figure 3.10 shows the percentage of connections (needing one-, two-, three-, four-, ve- and six-hop routes) blocked due to capacity exhaustion on Cut C1 with the previous experimental setup. It should be noted that, due to the critical location of Cut C1 , a signicant number of multihop connection requests have been blocked by it. Also, with increasing trac load, Cut C1 becomes more important and starts blocking more connections, e.g., it blocks 15% of 6-hops connections under load of 150 Erlang, while it blocks almost 55% of the same type of connections under load of 300 Erlang. Similar observations can be made for other critical cuts as well.
1 0.9 0.8 0.7 Exhaustion Probability 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0 0 C1 LB C experimental 1 C2 LB C experimental
2

10 12 Time t (month)

14

16

18

20

Figure 3.9: Exhaustion probability under constant trac model. In the next set of experiments, we calculate the 1-drop exhaustion probability of the same two cuts considering linearly growing trac, namely (t) = 0 (1 + t/16). We start our experiment with 0 = 150 Er-

49

80 70 Percentage of blocked connections 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 1 hop 2 hops 3 hops 4 hops 5 hops 6 hops

150

200

250 300 400 Traffic Intensity (Erlang)

500

Figure 3.10: Percentage of blocked connections for one-, two-, three-, four-, ve- and six-hop routes due to Cut C1 . lang which grows linearly and doubles every 16 units (months) of time. Figure 3.11 shows both the experimental and analytical (LB) 1-drop cutexhaustion probabilities. Again, non-optimal shortest-path routing gives higher values than the analytical results. Also, these results show that asymmetric addition of network resources is essential to achieve a desirable network performance. Figure 3.12 shows exhaustion probability of Cut C(S, T ) of the topology in Fig. 3.2, where each ber has 8 wavelengths. In this experiment, we consider linearly-growing trac with the same growth function as before, namely (t) = 0 (1 + t/16) and 0 = 8 Erlang. It should be noted that, in this case, the experimental results and analytical LB are very close but still the rst one is slightly higher than the LB. As the topology

50

0.8 Exhaustion Probability

0.6

0.4

0.2

C1 LB C experimental 1 C2 LB C experimental
2

0 0

10 12 Time t (month)

14

16

18

20

Figure 3.11: Exhaustion probability of Cuts C1 and C2 in Fig. 3.8 under linear trac-growth model. is simpler and we have a limited number of alternate routes, the amount of non-optimum routing is minimized; and, as a result, the experimental results are very close to their analytical LB. From a network operators perspective, it would be desirable to operate the network with very low exhaustion probability. This will ensure that, within a certain time period, all incoming connection requests will be typically satised. As a result, calculating capacity requirements under a target exhaustion probability constraints is an important objective. We have projected the capacity requirements using Equations (3.12) (3.15) of Cuts C1 and C2 in Figs. 3.13(a) and 3.13(b), respectively, with linearly-growing trac. In our experimental setup, Cut C1 has a capacity of 80 wavelengths from the very beginning. However, from Fig. 3.13(a),

51

0.9

0.8

0.7

Exhaustion Probability

0.6

0.5

0.4

0.3

0.2

0.1 C(S,T) LB C(S,T) experimental 0 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20

Time t (month)

Figure 3.12: Exhaustion probability for cut C(S, T ) of the topology in Fig. 3.2 under linear trac-growth model. it can be observed that, to maintain even 0.1 exhaustion probability, we need as few as 41 wavelengths for the rst 2 units (months) of time and 80 wavelengths will be only required after 12 time units (months). As a result, a huge amount of up-front capital expenditure can be saved and can be incrementally invested over time when it is required. Also, it should be noted that, after 20 time units (months), to operate under 0.1 exhaustion probability, Cut C1 requires 100 wavelengths while Cut C2 requires 90 wavelengths. A linear-growth pattern can also be observed due to our choice of a linear trac-growth model. However, optimal distribution of capacities among dierent links for a cut requires further investigation and is an open problem for future research.

52

100 95 90 85 80 Capacity 75 70 65 60 55 50 45 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 exhaustion probability = 0.1 exhaustion probability = 0.2

Time t (month)

14

16

18

20

(a) Capacity projection of Cut C1 .

90 85 80 75 70 Capacity 65 60 55 50 45 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 Time t (month) exhaustion probability = 0.1 exhaustion probability = 0.2 14 16 18 20

(b) Capacity projection of Cut C2 .

Figure 3.13: Capacity assignment of critical cuts C1 and C2 under a linear trac-growth model.

53

3.7

Conclusion

In this chapter, we proposed a new parameter called network-cut exhaustion probability which is more appropriate to study the network upgrade problem. We also proposed an ecient procedure to calculate a lower bound on the network-cut exhaustion probability. The analytical lower bound is independent of any specic routing algorithm employed by the network operator. We showed that a smaller set of cuts is sucient to evaluate the performance of an existing network. Capacity requirement projections of dierent critical cuts over time under several trac conditions were also shown. In a follow-on work [9], presented in Chapter 4, we have developed ecient methods to distribute capacity among dierent links of an existing network using the evaluation method developed in this study.

54

Chapter 4
Multi-Period Upgrading Approaches for Telecom Networks
4.1 Introduction

Upgrading telecom networks to sustain growing trac demands over time, while requiring minimum upfront cost, is a challenging problem. In this chapter, we investigate methods for such periodic upgrades (namely Network Engineering) to cope with trac growth in telecom mesh networks. Signicant cost savings can be achieved by upgrading the capacity of appropriate links at appropriate times. In the context of network upgrade, two dierent entities are involved, namely Internet service provider (ISP) and network operator. In a typical business model, ISPs do not own a physical network, instead they lease bandwidth from a network operator to provide connectivity to commercial or personal users. ISPs build their own virtual topology on top of the physical topology provided by network operators [40, 41]. When ISPs experience trac growth, they lease more bandwidth from the network operator and possibly from dierent operators to avoid monopoly. Typically, such upgrades take place every 6 months to 1 year, which is

55

known as multi-period upgrade. However, upgrading for multiple years is also practiced by both ISPs and network operators at useful times. Such upgrades are known as single-period (one-shot) upgrade. Network operators are primarily responsible for maintaining and upgrading resources in the physical topology. However, in some instances, the network operator may also serve as an ISP. But several aspects of network upgrade need to be treated dierently when a network operator is involved in contrast with an ISP. An ISP usually has the exibility to lease bandwidth from the network operator in smaller granularity (e.g., STS1). So, it can lease only as much bandwidth as necessary on particular routes to serve its customers. On the other hand, from the perspective of a network operator, an upgrade means the incremental addition to the number of wavelengths on optical WDM links, the Optical Crossconnects (OXC), as well as the number of interface cards supported by an OXC as discussed in Chapter 3 in details. The upgrade also depends on available technologies. If the current technology only supports 10 Gbps, 40 Gbps, or 100 Gbps transmission systems, the network operator is constrained to choose one or a combination of these transmission systems. Also, typically, an ISP can terminate all its previously-leased bandwidth and adopt a more optimized solution to maximize its resource utilization (when the contract period of leasing is over). On the other hand, when a network operator deploys new resources to upgrade its physical network, there is much less exibility to reallocate or redistribute those resources across its network. So it is even more critical for the network operator to investigate where, when, and how much resources to deploy for accommodating growing trac demands of the future. In the literature, the network upgrade problem has been studied from various perspectives. In [42, 43], authors addressed the problem of migrating higher bit rates by focusing on the physical-layer requirements

56

and the methods to reduce physical impairments for higher bit rates. Physical-layer impairments put several constraints on the coexistence of dierent generations of transmission technologies, namely 10G, 40G or 100G [44]. As a result, careful network planning is required for any type of physical network upgrade. However, with a statistical trac forecast in hand, a careful routing optimization may also achieve signicant savings in capital expenditure (CAPEX). In this chapter, we study such routing optimization in the context of network engineering. Our solution approaches also consider all the requirements induced by both ISPs and network operators. A typical Network Engineering method calculates the steady-state connection blocking probabilities to predict the future upgrade of network resources [2830]. While such an approach may be appropriate to design a packet-switched network (lossy network) with a certain packet-loss probability, it is not desirable to reject a high-speed connection request over an optical network (discussed in Chapter 3). Considering the high bit rate, the longevity, and the revenue generated by provisioning a connection, every eort should be made to satisfy such a connection request. Hence, it is desirable to upgrade network resources periodically in order to accommodate all new requests. Noting that blocking probability is a steady-state parameter of a network, it is not appropriate to use blocking probability to dimension a network which goes through periodic upgrades (and never reaches steady state) to satisfy the growing trac demands. In other words, blocking probability can not be used as a trigger to upgrade where we need to optimize additional network resources such that ISPs or network operators should try to avoid rejecting even a single connection during a planned period. To achieve such critical goals, we model our optimization problem based on exhaustion probability [6, 33, 34]. In [33], the authors have

57

introduced exhaustion probability which is ecient and appropriate to assist incremental growth in optical networks. Exhaustion probability is dened as the probability that at least one lightpath request will be rejected during a time period (0, T ) due to lack of capacity (i.e., bandwidth) on some link. In other words, it is the probability of rejecting the very rst connection request due to capacity exhaustion. In this chapter, we propose a simplied model of exhaustion probability based on the concept introduced in Chapter 3 [6, 33] and use it in our resource optimization formulation. The rest of this chapter is organized as follows. A review of related work in network engineering is presented in Section 4.2. Section 4.3 proposes a simplied formulation of exhaustion probability that is used as a constraint of our optimization model in later sections. In Section 4.4, both ISPs and network operators requirements are discussed and modeled formally. Section 4.4.1 describes the mathematical model and a heuristic approach to optimize network upgrades for ISPs. A formulation and heuristic to address the network operators requirements is presented in Section 4.4.2. Section 4.5 presents several illustrative numerical examples to validate our approaches. Section 4.6 concludes the chapter.

4.2

Related Work

Little research exists on resource dimensioning for telecom mesh networks to support trac growth. However, a signicant amount of research has been done to facilitate optimized design of such mesh network from scratch. In some instances, these works can serve as a reference point to investigate incremental upgrade of a telecom optical networks. As discussed earlier, ISPs are interested in expanding their virtual topologies with the leased bandwidth from network operators. These

58

topologies, which are typically built on top of physical WDM networks, provide exible routing and scheduling for the needs of dierent customers. Many logical layers can share one or more WDM lower-level networks. Some research has been done on such logical-level optical network design and optimization [41, 45]. Reconguration of optical networks has been studied, both for broadcast optical networks [46], and for wavelength-routed networks [40, 47, 48]. In these studies, the problem is generally treated as a two-phase operation where the rst phase is virtual-topology design for the new trac conditions and the second phase is the transition operation from the old virtual topology to the newly-designed one. However, many of the results were still applied to static trac models with xed-path routing or xed alternate routing. Dimensioning a virtual topology to support dynamic bandwidth requests considering trac growth is still not suciently studied. In some studies, the authors investigated network dimensioning that determines the number of wavelength channels assigned to each physical link to meet the trac demand and reduce cost [33, 34]. The authors in [33] proposed an asymptotic routing and dimensioning approach based on exhaustion probability analysis of a linear trac-growth model. The author in [49] then proposed a time-dependent blocking probability approach that further reduces network capacity. This work studied transient network behavior starting from zero initial trac, with the assumption that the network is periodically re-dimensioned and is able to be re-constructed in a timely manner to respond to the trac change. In [6], the authors proposed a parameter called network-cut exhaustion probability, which is also discussed in Chapter 3, is more appropriate to study the network upgrade problem. Their analysis gives a lower bound on the capacity requirement on dierent links which is routing independent.

59

Some works on dimensioning optical networks considering wavelengthcontinuity constraint and physical impairments [50] focus on placement of wavelength converters and regenerators. The authors of [51] investigated the usefulness of wavelength converters on varying topologies, trac loads, and available wavelengths per bers. For static trac demands, the lightpath provisioning problem is usually solved by formulating an integer linear program (ILP). The work in [52] proposed an ILP solution to provision wavelength ber resources with or without wavelength converters. The authors in [53] formulated another ILP solution to allocate wavelength channels, OXCs, and wavelength converters on a physical topology dimensioning for a given trac demand. They decomposed the whole problem into dimensioning and routing subproblem and wavelength assignment subproblem to alleviate the computational burden of solving the whole ILP. The authors in [54] studied a network coverage problem by minimizing switching nodes and transceivers on a topology. Service migration is also addressed by [5557]. In [55], the authors investigated strategies for service migration at minimized overall operational costs. The authors of [56, 57] describe the transition from low to high bit rate services; thereby they focus on the physical requirements and the possibilities to reduce physical impairments for higher bit rates. However, resource dimensioning for evolving trac demands with optimized routing, starting with non-zero initial state, is a challenging problem that receives more interest from business entities that have established optical backbone networks with ongoing high-data-rate connections.

60

Numerical values Approximate values Link Exhaustion probabilty 0.1 10 Capacity (N) 10
1 2

20

40 60 Traffic ()

80

100

Figure 4.1: Capacity requirements of a link under dierent load.

4.3

Exhaustion Probability Modeling

In Chapter 3, we developed a method to compute exhaustion probability and demonstrated its relationship with network capacity and trac demand. Exhaustion probability is a time-dependent parameter that signies no blocking (over a time duration), so it is well suited for optical backbone network, where the network operator can not aord any connection rejection. The concept of exhaustion probability is introduced in Section 3.3. In this section we develop a simplied model based on the analysis given in Section 3.3 which can be used to formulate the network upgrade optimization methods. We compute the exhaustion probability by numerical methods using a First-Order Dierential Equation (ODE) solver (MATLAB). For a certain time instance, to maintain exhaustion probability below 0.1 (which

61

means that the probability of blocking the very rst connection by a particular link is bellow 0.1), the required capacity for a given trac intensity can be approximated by Eqn. (4.1). It should also be noted that an exhausted link does not necessarily mean a blocked connection, as the connection can be routed through a dierent path. As a result, even exhaustion probability of 0.1 of a link can facilitate highly-available network connectivity. The approximate function and the numerical values are shown in Fig. 4.1. It should be noted that the approximate function performs with reasonable accuracy in the desired range. The coecient values of the approximation function are given below: N ex ((t)) = 3 (t) + 2 (t) + (t) + C where = 3.801e5 , = 0.007919, = 1.738, and C = 5.27.

(4.1)

4.4

Network Upgrade Methods

As discussed earlier, we propose ecient methods to optimize routing that leads to minimum upgrade cost of the network. According to the mathematical model in Section 4.3, for a certain exhaustion-probabilityconstrained network upgrade, the additional required capacity on a particular link has a non-linear relationship with the total bandwidth (statistical average) on that link (Eqn. (4.1)). It follows that shortest-path routing, even though it takes the least amount of bandwidth for an individual connection, may not give optimum cost-eective solution for network upgrade when there is a potential of multiplexing dierent connections on a single link. The additional capacity required on a link, if two connections (statistical bandwidth averages) are multiplexed on it, is less than the total capacity required (on two dierent links) if they are routed through two dierent links. However, while achieving more multiplexing, some demands may take longer routes which may lead to

62

some bandwidth penalty as well. A detailed explanation is given in the following example. In the example network topology of Fig. 4.2, two trac demands (1,4 = 50 and 1,6 = 50) have been routed along their shortest paths, leading to an additional capacity assignment of 77 units on the links (1,2), (2,4), (1,3), (3,5), and (5,6) for a total additional cost of 385 (Fig. 4.2(a)). However, if we route these two demands as in Fig. 4.2(b) (i.e., with trafc multiplexing), then the capacity requirements on links (1,2) and (2,4) would be 137 units, and 77 units on link (4,6), which would result in a total additional cost of 374.1 (Fig. 4.2(b)). Thus, a proper multiplexing of trac ows can reduce the total capacity upgrade investment. Intuitively, the reasoning behind this advantage is that by combining ows, the probability that all the ows will be at their peak at the same time is lowered and hence capacity requirement (for all the ows combined) to satisfy certain exhaustion probability does not grow linearly. This optimization problem can be formulated as a non-linear program (NLP); however, as discussed earlier, some of the assumptions and constraints would be dierent depending on the entity, i.e., ISP or network operator who wants to perform the upgrade. In the following two sections, we formulate and discuss the two specic problems.

4.4.1

Upgrading for Internet Service Provider

In a typical cost model, the fee an ISP pays for a connection depends on the amount of bandwidth and the distance between source and destination of the connection. In our model, we assume a static cost per link that is proportional to the length of that link. The objective is to minimize the total cost, which is computed as the sum of unitary capacity-cost per link multiplied by capacity on that link. Equations (4.3) and (4.4) are the classical multicommodity ow constraints, and Eqn. (4.5) is the non-linear capacity constraint (according to Eqn. (4.1)). Equation (4.5)

63

Figure 4.2: Example of cost-optimized routing. enforces that the network upgrade occurs by guaranteeing an exhaustion probability less than 0.1 at time t which ensures that the network will be highly available during that period. The capacity on a link is also bounded by the maximum value CU B , which enforces asymmetry (and diversity) of the network. It should be noted that, while upgrading from one period to another, there is no constraint in the formulation which limits the ISP to build up on top of an existing topology. This is due to the fact that ISPs can terminate their previous lease and redesign their new optimized virtual topology with new leases. However, terminating all previous connections may disrupt existing services. So, as a trade-o, ISPs can terminate connections selectively.
(i,j)E

min s.t. Flow Constraints:

j j sd fji (t)

Cij nij (t)

(4.2)

j j

sd fij (t) = sd (t) (s, d) D, i = d

(4.3) (4.4)

sd fji (t)

sd / fij (t) = 0 (s, d) D, i {s, d}

Capacity Constraints:

64

sd fij (t)) (i, j) E nij (t) = Ntex (

s,d

(4.5) (4.6) (4.7) (4.8)

nij (t) R+ nij (t) CU B

(i, j) E (i, j) E

sd fij (t) 0 (i, j) E, (s, d) D

The given input parameter sd (t) is the demand (statistical average) between node pair (s, d) at time t and Cij is the cost of unit capacity of link (i, j). CU B is the maximum available capacity on any link. Also the topology is given.
sd We need to solve the capacity provisioning problem for fij (t) which is

the amount of the demand for node pair (s, d) owing through link (i, j) at time t. Variable nij (t) is the required capacity on link (i, j) to support the total ow passing through that link while maintaining the required exhaustion probability. As pointed out earlier, the capacity constraint given by Eqn. (4.5) makes the optimization problem non-linear. Several scientic tools, e.g., CPLEX or MATLAB can be used to solve such problems with small sizes. In Section 4.5, we present some numerical results for the NLP where it is obtainable. However, such a problem is hard to solve for a large network in a reasonable time even with state-of-the-art computational resources. So, we propose a heuristic, called Network Upgrade for ISP (NUSP), which runs in polynomial time and performs very close to the NLP solutions (results are shown in scenarios where NLP solutions are available). NUSP is a local-search based heuristic. The initial solution given to the heuristic is the capacity assignment according to shortest-path routing. Then in each iteration, it chooses one sd (t) from the demand set D and delete the corresponding ows from the network. The heuristic then tries to nd another cheaper routing for sd (t) by assigning a new cost metric

65

which promotes ow multiplexing. At this point, the heuristic also make sure that no capacity constraints are been violated The heuristic keep repeating these steps until further cost optimization is possible. The chosen sequence of sd (t) might inuence the nal results. In this study we used a random sequence for experimentation. The heuristic is given in Algorithm 2. Algorithm 2 NUSP
1: sd (t) D, nd the shortest path (with respect to Cij as cost met-

ric) between s and d as the initial solution considering capacity constraint CU B .

2: (i, j) E, calculate the capacity requirement according to nij (t)

sd Ntex ( s,d fij (t)).

s 3: Choose one s d (t) D and delete the ows fij d (t) from the network

and update the capacity requirements for all links.

4: Assign a new cost metric C (i, j) for (i, j) E as:

(N ex ( f sd (t) + s d (t)) N ex ( f sd (t))) C , i,j t t s,d ij s,d ij C (i, j) sd if Ntex ( s,d fij (t) + s d (t)) CU B innite, otherwise

5: Find the new shortest path according to cost metric C (i, j) for s d (t)

and calculate the new capacities after rerouting.

6: Repeat Steps 3-5 for sd (t) D. 7: Calculate the total network cost; if it reduces from the previous step,

then repeat Steps 3-6. For illustration purposes of NUSP, we have chosen the same example from Fig. 4.2. The initial solution is given in Fig. 4.3(a) and the link labels represent the cost of transporting unit bandwidth through that link. According to the heuristic we then delete 1,6 (Step 3) from the network and update the capacities for the network. Figure 4.3(c) shows

66

Figure 4.3: Illustrative example of NUSP. the calculated new cost metrics for the network according to Step 4 of NUSP. Now, the new shortest path for 1,6 would be 1-2-4-6. As a result, NUSP gets some cost reduction for the whole network, and keeps on doing so until no further improvement is possible after trying the rerouting for all (s,d) pairs.

4.4.2

Upgrading for Network Operator

For the network operator, upgrading network capacity means adding new wavelengths which require lighting up a new ber or increasing the capacity of an existing wavelength. So, the network operator has to invest on line cards and/or transmission systems at the switching nodes. Now, our main goal is to minimize the total cost for the line cards while upgrading the network to accommodate new trac as we are not considering cost of new ber deployment (typically network operators deploy ber at once and not in incremental way). In the objective function (Eqn. (4.9)), the terms C 10G (t), C 40G (t), and C 100G (t) refer to the cost of 10G, 40G, and 100G line cards, respectively.

67

The cost functions are also time-dependent as we include a CAPEX costdepreciation factor ("CAPEX factor") in the model which refers to the percentage of cost decrease for network equipment from one period to the next one due to maturity of technology and mass production. The initial cost of those equipments are given. Also, the time period for which upgrade has to be done is given. Typically for incremental growth this time period is 6-12 months. For long term upgrade the time period is multiple years (e.g., 5 years). Volume discount is also considered for higher bit rates which means that the cost of a resource increases at a rate that is lower than the linear increase of the transmission rate, e.g., the cost of a 40G line card is 2.5 times that of a 10G line card, which is less than the transmission rate increase of 4 times [58]. Our objective is to minimize incremental upgrade cost. We have to solve the upgrade problem for variables Xij (t), Yij (t), and Zij (t), which represent the number of required line cards at time t on link (i,j) of 10G, 40G, and 100G, respectively. Similar to the formulation for ISP, Eqns. (4.10) and (4.11) are classd sical multicommodity ow constraints where fij (t) is the amount of the

demand sd (t) for node pair (s, d) owing through link (i, j). Equation (4.12) gives the lower limit of capacity requirement on link (i, j) ensuring exhaustion probability of less than 0.1 at time t. As discussed earlier, network operators can not upgrade for arbitrary capacities; instead they have to choose either 10G, 40G, or 100G line cards or a combination of those (assuming here that these are the only technologies available at the time of upgrade). Equation (4.13) enforces that the total capacity deployed on a link, in terms of desired granularity, would be more than the minimum requirement (nij in Gbps) calculated from Eqn. (4.12). Also, unlike ISP, the network operator can not aord to redesign its network every time; instead it has to upgrade incrementally on top of existing de-

68

ployment. Equations (4.14)-(4.16) enforce that the number of line cards of a particular transmission speed at time t should be more than or same as the previous period (t 1), thus ensuring incremental growth.
(i,j)E

min

C 10G (t) (Xij (t) Xij (t 1)) + C 40G (t) (Yij (t) Yij (t 1))+ C 100G (t) (Zij (t) Zij (t 1)) (4.9)

s.t. Flow Constraints:

j j sd fji (t) sd fji (t)

j j

sd fij (t) = sd (t) (s, d) D, i = d sd fij (t) = 0 (s, d) D, i {s, d} /

(4.10) (4.11)

Capacity Constraints: sd fij (t)) (i, j) E nij (t) = Ntex (

s,d

(4.12) (4.13) (4.14) (4.15) (4.16) (4.17) (4.18)

10 Xij (t) + 40 Yij (t) + 100 Zij (t) nij (t) (i, j) E Xij (t) Xij (t 1) Yij (t) Yij (t 1) Zij (t) Zij (t 1) nij (t) R+ nij (t) CU B (i, j) E (i, j) E (i, j) E

(i, j) E (i, j) E

sd fij (t) 0 (i, j) E, (s, d) D

(4.19)

Again, as Eqn. (4.12) is a non-linear constraint, it takes signicant amount of time to get a solution for realistic-sized networks using MATLAB. However, our proposed heuristic, Network Upgrade for Network Operator (NUNO), based on a local-search approach and similar to NUSP,

69

Algorithm 3 NUNO
1: sd (t) D, nd the shortest path between s and d as the initial

solution.

2: (i, j) E, calculate the capacity requirement nij (t) Ntex (

s,d

sd fij (t))

and nd the cheapest combination of 10G, 40G, and 100G line cards, so that the assigned capacity ACi,j (t) nij (t), ACi,j (t) CU B , Xij (t) Xij (t 1), Yij (t) Yij (t 1), and Zij (t) Zij (t 1).
s 3: Choose one s d (t) D and delete the ows fij d (t) from the network

and update capacities ACi,j (t) for all links. new cost metric C (i, j) for (i, j) E as: 4: Assign a 0, if N ex ( f sd (t) + s d (t)) AC (t) t ij s,d ij ex sd s d ex sd C (i, j) = N ( s,d fij (t) + (t)) Nt ( s,d fij (t)), t sd if Ntex ( s,d fij (t) + s d (t)) CU B inf inite, otherwise

5: Find the new shortest path according to cost metric C( i, j) for s d (t)

and calculate new capacities after rerouting.

6: Repeat Steps 3-5 for sd (t) D. 7: Calculate total network cost; if it reduces from the previous step, then

repeat Steps 3-6.

70

achieves close-to-optimal result very quickly. Even though the working principle is similar for both heuristics, NUNO diers in various steps to enforce the additional constraints introduced to satisfy the network operators requirements. In Step 2, the assigned capacity has to be a combination of 10G, 40G, and 100G line cards. Also, the cost of these line cards are not linear with respect to their transmission speeds. So, the cheapest combination has to be chosen from all possible combinations that satisfy the minimum required bandwidth. In Step 4, if the additional ow s d (t) does not increase the assigned capacity (ACij (t)) on link (i, j), then that ow can be transported without any additional cost, and hence the corresponding cost is zero, otherwise the cost is sd sd Ntex ( s,d fij (t) + s d (t)) Ntex ( s,d fij (t)) to account for the additional capacity that has to be added.

4.5

Illustrative Numerical Examples

To demonstrate the performance of our approaches and the cost savings they can achieve, we have dimensioned an 14-node US-based network for dierent time instances. We scale up the trac according to the growth function, (t) = 0 (1 +
t ), 16

which doubles the trac in every 16 months

(t is expressed in months). Performance of NUSP and the corresponding NLP are compared in Fig. 4.4. For a better bench marking, we also compare our results with a upgrading approach where shortest path is used as a routing mechanism. Typically, ISPs are concerned about total cost and indierent about the underlying technologies that support their connectivity. So, we compared total cost of dierent approaches as the trac grows over time. It should be noted that results for NUSP approach are very close to the optimal solution by the NLP. However, the results for the NLP are shown where it is solvable. With our intelligent dimensioning approach,

71

Figure 4.4: Performance comparison of NUSP with other approaches.

Figure 4.5: Capacity distribution for dierent links by NUSP. 6-30% cost savings can be possible over the shortest-path approach. The capacity distribution of dierent links in one instance (t = 18 months) is also shown in Fig. 4.5 (in the capacity tuple, the rst value represents the capacity in ST S 1 from lower sequence node to higher sequence node, and second value represents the capacity of the other direction in same unit). It should be noted that, even with a uniform trac distribution, the capacities required on dierent links are quite

72

Figure 4.6: Total cost and number of line cards required by NUNO in a multi-period approach.

Figure 4.7: Total cost and number of line cards required by NUNO in a single-period approach. asymmetric as the topology itself is asymmetric in terms of nodal degrees and link lengths. Our network upgrading approach proposed in Section 4.4.2 tries to minimize the additional cost of network line cards that need to be installed by the network operator to support trac growth. As discussed

73

earlier, line cards with higher bit rates get volume discount compared to lower bit rates. In our simulation, we used the cost ratio 10G : 40G : 100G = 1 : 2.5 : 3.75 [58]. Also, cost depreciation was not considered initially; it will be factored in in a later example.Intuitively, having a trac forecast for a longer period (e.g., several years) can assist to better optimize network resources as higher bit rate line cards can be installed upfront. However, a huge upfront CAPEX has to be committed, and as forecasts for longer period tend to have more inaccuracy, the network operator might end up over-investing or under-investing for upgrades. Multi-period upgrading is an attractive alternative where the network operator upgrades for a shorter period of time (e.g., every 6 months). Figure 4.6 presents results from heuristic NUNO showing dierent number of line cards require over time, employing a multi-period approach for the same network topology as in Fig. 4.5. (In general, note that the ISPs topology and the network operators topology can be quite dierent.) The values over the bars show the percentage of additional total bandwidth requirement from the previous period. It should be noted that, even though the trac is growing uniformly over time, upgrade requirements are not uniform. The upgrade needs depend on the level of trac multiplexing and various other issues mentioned in earlier sections. To have a better understanding, in Fig. 4.7, the one-shot long period (for 5 years) upgrading requirements are shown. As discussed earlier, there is a cost advantage in the end results for one-shot upgrade compared to multi-period upgrade. In Fig. 4.8 (one-shot upgrade), by the end of 5 years, total installed capacity in the network is 13470 Gbps, while in Fig. 4.6 (multi-period) by the end of the same period the total capacity installed is 15030 Gbps which is 12% more than the previous approach. However, one-shot approach might be inexible with forecast inaccuracy. It should be noted that the number of 100G line cards in-

74

Figure 4.8: Total cost and number of line cards required considering YoY cost depreciation. stalled in the network in the one-shot approach is much higher than that of the multi-period approach, giving the cost advantage. For a more realistic case study, CAPEX depreciation over time is considered for various line cards. The CAPEX reduction factor depends on the maturity of a particular technology, e.g., cost of 10G line card will go down faster than a 40G line card as 10G technology is more mature and widely deployed compared to 40G technology. We consider a 15% Yearover-Year (YoY) cost depreciation factor for 10G line cards, 10% for 40G line cards, and 5% for 100G line cards [42]. Results for a multi-period upgrade, considering YoY cost depreciation, are shown in Fig. 4.8. It can be observed that, as cost of 10G technology goes down faster, almost 77% more 10G line cards (356 10G line cards with cost depreciation and 201 without cost depreciation as shown in Fig. 4.8 and 4.6, respectively) are used in the end solution compared to the approach where no cost depreciation is considered.

75

4.6

Conclusion

In this chapter, we proposed ecient upgrade mechanisms to meet both the ISPs and the network operators needs. Mathematical model as well as heuristic approaches were given to achieve highly-available network dimensioning. It was found that optimized routing which enforces trac multiplexing can lead to signicant cost reduction. Various practical aspects such as volume discount and CAPEX depreciation factor were considered for a practical case study. Also, several aspects of multiperiod upgrading vs. single-period (one-shot) upgrading were studied. It should be noted that the underlying principles of our upgrading approaches, which enforce trac multiplexing among dierent connections, also lead to resource consolidation. As a result, our approach decreases operational cost (OPEX) of an existing network. In future work, it would be interesting to investigate how much OPEX savings can be achieved by consolidating resources using the underlying principles of our approach.

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Chapter 5
Towards Next-Generation Broadband Access Technologies: The Virtue of Sharing
5.1 Introduction

A sustained evolution in next-generation applications and services is increasing the bandwidth demand in the access network as can be seen over the past several years. Residential subscribers demand rst-mile access solutions that provide high bandwidth and oer media-rich services. Similarly, corporate users demand broadband infrastructure through which they can connect their local-area networks to the Internet backbone. In recent years, the most popular broadband technology which has shown the potential to meet the future bandwidth demands is the Passive Optical Network (PON). A PON is a point-to-multipoint (physical topology) optical network, where an optical line terminal (OLT) at the CO is connected to many optical network units (ONUs) at customer premises through one or multiple 1:N optical splitters (or arrayed waveguide grating (AWG)). The network between the OLT and the ONU is passive, i.e., it does not have active electronic devices and therefore does not require

77

any power supply. A typical PON deployment uses a single ber from the CO to the splitter or AWG and employs one or multiple wavelength channel(s) to communicate to ONUs. The dominant PON technologies, namely Ethernet PON (EPON, standardized by IEEE) and Gigabit PON (GPON, standardized by ITU-T), use a Time-Division Multiplexing Access (TDMA) mechanism to share the communication channels among its users. Even though there are some dierences in the specications of these two technologies, their performance is largely determined by the underlying principle of time-division multiplexing. TDM PON uses a single wavelength in each of the two directionsdownstream (CO to end users) and upstream (end users to CO), and the wavelengths are multiplexed on the same ber through coarse WDM (CWDM). Thus, the bandwidth available in a single wavelength is shared among all end users. Such a solution was envisaged primarily to keep the cost of the access equipment low and to make commercial deployments economically feasible. The other variant of the PON technology, which employs dedicated wavelength channels to achieve Point-to-Point (P2P) connectivity between the OLT and each individual ONU on top of the point-to-multipoint physical topology, is known as WDM PON. The technology rst emerged as early as mid-1990s and got a renewed interest in recent years as some major technological advances were reported in the scientic literature. Recently, some system vendors have released WDM PON systems [59] that are currently in the trail phase of deployment. The state-of-theart experimental WDM PON system, as reported in the literature, can support 100 Mbps - 2 Gbps symmetric communication per wavelength channel with 32 ONUs [59, 60]. It should be noted that all the aforementioned bandwidths are the eective user bandwidth and do not include

78

line-coding overhead. In the downstream direction in the WDM PON, the wavelength channels are routed from the OLT to the ONUs by a passive AWG instead of a passive splitter used in the TDM PON. Every WDM PON ONU on the same ber plant receives a unique wavelength with the help of the AWG, which is a passive optical wavelength-routing device. A generic colorless wide-band (wavelength agnostic, i.e., identical components regardless of the working wavelength) receiver is used in the ONU to receive the ONUspecic wavelength. A multi-wavelength source at the OLT is used for transmitting multiple wavelengths to the various ONUs. Among various WDM PON architectures, a solution based on the wavelength-locked (i.e., the laser excites only one mode when a well-adjusted external optical signal is coming in) Fabry-Perot laser diodes (FP LDs) has become most popular. This architecture uses a spectrum-sliced broadband light source (BLS1) (originated from the OLT) to excite the FP LDs residing in the ONUs for upstream communication. It should be emphasized that, irrespective of the underlying technology, WDM PON logically operates as a point-to-point system, as opposed to the point-to-multipoint principle of the EPON and GPON systems. The objective of this chapter is to perform a fair and detailed comparison of the WDM PON and TDM PON under common deployment scenarios and identical user behavior. Some WDM PON systems, which are commercially available and are in trial phase, provide symmetrical bandwidth of 100 Mbps per ONU to 32 ONUs and 1 Gbps to 16 ONUs [59]. An experimental design that can achieve up to 2 Gbps per ONU to 32 ONUs over 20 km of single-mode ber has also been reported [60]. Available TDM PON systems also support a range of transmission speeds. The rst generation of EPON can support 1 Gbps symmetric transmission. GPON and the second generation of EPON (standardized

79

by CCSA in China) can support 1.25 Gbps upstream and 2.5 Gbps downstream at distances up to 20 km with 32-way signal split [61]. Nextgeneration GPON supporting 10 Gbps in the downstream direction and 2.5 Gbps in the upstream direction is being currently developed in ITU-T [62, 63]. The recently-approved IEEE 802.3av standard for 10G-EPON supports asymmetric 10 Gbps downstream and 1 Gbps upstream transmissions as well as symmetric 10 Gbps transmission at distances up to 20 km with 32-way signal split. In this chapter, we focus on state-of-the-art WDM PON and TDM PON technologies. For WDM PON, we consider a system that can support 32 ONUs with 32, dedicated 1-Gbps WDM channels in both directions. To represent TDM PON technology, we used symmetric 10 Gbps EPON, mainly because the 10G-EPON standard has been completed, equipment has been demonstrated, and various overhead components are well understood. We studied the above mentioned technologies under realistic deployment scenarios through detailed simulations. Our investigation shows that, even though WDM PON oers much higher aggregated bandwidth compared to 10G-EPON, it does not necessarily yield better user experience or better utilization of network resources. The rest of the chapter is organized as follows. Section 5.2 explains the usage behavior of broadband customers under realistic conditions, which are often ignored in the literature. We also explain the broadband trac characteristics in this section. Section 5.3 describes our simulation model and setup. Section 5.4 presents numerical results for various key performance parameters for a comparative study of the broadband technologies mentioned above. Section 5.5 concludes the chapter.

80

5.2

User Behavior and Trac Characteristic

While several research initiatives have been undertaken to study the characteristics of Internet trac, little has been done to analyze the impact of subscriber behavior, usage patterns, and non-uniformity of bandwidth demands on network performance. Quite often, it is found that many technologies show promising performance in a lab environment, but largely disappoint after actual deployment. So, it is very important to assess the potential of a technology under a realistic operating environment before making a multimillion dollar commitment to that particular technology. As mentioned earlier, in recent years, several broadband technologies are gaining traction and drawing the attention of industry leaders in the broadband sector. However, unrealistic assumptions about the operating environment can mislead the practitioner about the capability of candidate technologies and will not allow them to fully utilize their investment. In this chapter, our objective is to analyze the performance of EPON and WDM PON systems under realistic usage scenarios and to point out the true potential of these technologies. One of the key factors which has often been neglected in the context of next-generation broadband technologies is the behavior of actual users of broadband services. If a technology does not meet the exact requirements of its consumer, then even its most sophisticated features do not add any practical value to its users experience. The same is true for broadband technologies. The point we want to make in this chapter is that the usage behavior of broadband customers should inuence the underlying broadband technology. It has been reported in the literature that the behavior is non-uniform [6468]. In many instances, the usage behavior follows the Pareto principle where 80% of the trac is generated by only 20% of the users [64]. However, according to some operators, the asymmetry is

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even higher where almost 80%-90% of trac is generated by only 10% of heavy users [67, 68]. The remaining users generate very little trac and therefore are referred to as light users. Clearly, the practical operating conditions are much dierent than what was previously considered in most of the studies found in the literature. In this study, we consider such non-uniform usage behavior of broadband consumers to evaluate the performance of the aforementioned broadband technologies. To perform an accurate and realistic performance analysis, it is also important to simulate the system behavior with appropriate trac injected into the system. There are extensive studies showing that most network trac ows (i.e., those generated by http, ftp, variable-bit-rate (VBR) video applications, etc.) can be accurately characterized by selfsimilarity and long-range dependence (LRD) [69]. This means that extremely large bursts of data (packet trains) and extremely long periods of silence (inter-arrival times) will occur from time to time. As a result, analytic models employing a simpler-to-analyze negative exponential distribution are less accurate and often provide overly-optimistic estimates for the delays and queue sizes To obtain realistic results, we perform our simulation using synthetic trac traces that exhibit the properties of self-similarity and long-range dependence (LRD). To generate self-similar trac, we use the method described in [69], where the resulting trac is an aggregation of multiple streams, each consisting of alternating Pareto-distributed ON/OFF periods. The examined packet-size distribution (PSD) contains Ethernet frames with sizes ranging between 64 and 2000 bytes (the reported value in [70] has been extrapolated to be compliant with the recently-approved IEEE 802.3as "Frame Extension" standard). The reported packet sizes clearly

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Figure 5.1: WDM PON setup with 32 ONUs. show a tri-modal shape of the PSD, both in metro as well as in access networks [70]. The PSD also inuence the Ethernet overhead obtained in the PON implementation and is considered in our simulation.

5.3

Simulation Model and Setup

To obtain comparable results, both WDM PON and 10G-EPON were congured to use the same number of ONUs, identical trac patterns, and the same OLT uplink capacity. Several performance parameters such as packet delay and packet loss ratio depend on the amount of memory available in both OLT and ONU for packet buering. However, buer size has similar eect on both WDM PON and EPON and discussed in [61]. We allocated 1 MB of buer size per ONU and 32 MB for OLT in both WDM and EPON systems. It should also be noted that, in a central oce, OLTs are connected to the higher level of aggregation switches and/or directly connected to the metro/regional network. In a typical deployment, this connectivity supports hardly more than 10 Gbps [71]. Such 10 Gbps connectivity for both upstream and downstream (OLT to the aggregation switch) are shown in Figs. 5.1 and 5.2. To achieve accurate simulation results, the 10G-EPON model closely follows the specications in IEEE 802.3av. The grant/request mech-

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Figure 5.2: 10G-EPON setup with 32 ONUs. anism is implemented using GATE and REPORT messages exchanged between the OLT and the connected ONUs. The overhead introduced by periodic exchange of GATE and REPORT messages, as well as other overhead components (including mandatory Forward Error Correction (FEC) encoding, burst-mode overhead, Ethernet framing overhead, etc.) are considered under representative physical parameter values obtained from the equipment vendors [10]. Some of the overhead components depend on the number of ONUs in the system, and polling cycle time during which all ONUs should be scheduled. It also depends on Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation (DBA) algorithm implementations which vary from system to system. In this study, we assume a simple DBA, which schedules all ONUs sequentially, once in every polling cycle. Under light load, when ONUs dont have enough data, they are scheduled more frequently, thereby achieving low end-to-end (E2E) packet delay. The DBA also allocates some band gap (80 ns) between consecutive upstream data bursts to accommodate worst-case clock drift between ONUs. As shown in [10], under the most stringent operating conditions, a 10G-EPON can achieve up to 8 Gbps of upstream throughput and 8.5 Gbps of downstream throughput.

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A typical WDM PON operates as a point-to-point (P2P) system where no communication channels are shared among its users (ONUs) and hence no DBA is required. In our simulation model, dedicated bi-directional channels are assigned for each ONU to communicate with the OLT and vice versa. We also assume that no control messages are required for its operations and all communications take place in continuous mode. However, in our implementation, we consider Ethernet framing structure for the P2P communication, which introduces some insignicant overhead. Performance of both systems is analyzed using input trac with identical packet-size distribution and equal load.

5.4

Simulation Results

In this section, we compare dierent performance parameters, namely throughput, packet delay, and packet loss ratio of 10G-EPON and WDM PON, under similar operating conditions. As discussed earlier, in a practical deployment, customers usage behavior is far from uniform and largely follows the Pareto principle where a small number of subscribers use most of the bandwidth. Scenarios where 10% of subscribers consume 80% or even 90% of bandwidth are very common in practice, according to leading broadband providers [6468]. In our simulation, we employed 10% of ONUs as heavy users which generate 80% and 90% of the total upstream trac in two separate setups. The rest of the trac is generated by the light users. The downstream trac is split similarly, i.e., 80% and 90% of trac will be targeted for 10% of ONUs.

5.4.1

Total PON Utilization

It should be noted that, for 10G-EPON, total available (aggregated) bandwidth from customer premises (ONU) to central oce (OLT) is 10 Gbps (8 - 8.5 Gbps excluding all overheads) while that bandwidth is nearly 32 Gbps for WDM PON (with thirtytwo, 1-Gbps channels). So it does not re-

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Figure 5.3: Total upstream (US) bandwidth utilization vs. US oered load. quire sophisticated measures to realize that, under uniform load, WDM PON will outperform 10G-EPON. However, under practical, non-uniform load distributions, the results are quite dierent. Figure 5.3 shows the total PON utilization of both 10G-EPON and WDM PON under dierent load conditions. It can be observed that EPON utilization saturates to maximum achievable value under heavy load, irrespective of the load distributions and is almost 45%-90% higher than WDM PON utilization. The reason is that, in 10G-EPON, heavy users can achieve higher throughput when light users dont have any trac to transmit. But, in WDM PON, heavy users cannot achieve more than 1 Gbps (maximum channel bandwidth dedicated to them) even though unused bandwidth is available in the system. In other words, it is the virtue of sharing that enables EPON to achieve higher utilization where WDM PON just wastes most of its bandwidth under realistic trac conditions. WDM PON attains somewhat higher utilization when the load non-uniformity decreases to 80 10, i.e., 80% trac is generated by 10%

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Figure 5.4: Total downstream (DS) bandwidth utilization vs. DS oered load. of users, compared to the 90 10 case where 90% of trac is generated by 10% users, but still well below EPON. The reason is that, in the rst case, light users are generating more trac compared to the second case and heavy users are achieving the same (1 Gbps) bandwidth in both cases. As a result, total utilization is higher in the former case. So, it can be concluded that WDM PON will underperform even more severely as usage asymmetry in the network increases. Similar performance can also be observed in downstream (DS) transmission, as shown in Fig. 5.4. However, as several overhead components do not exist in downstream channel for 10G-EPON (e.g., laser on/o times, and burst synchronization/alignment), the total achievable utilization is higher and close to 8.5 Gbps. As a result, under heavy load, 10G-EPON has a 56% - 105% higher bandwidth utilization than that of WDM PON. Again WDM PON performs a little better in case of 80-10 load distribution compared to 90-10 load split.

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5.4.2

Throughput per Heavy User

The poor performance experienced by WDM PON under asymmetric load is due to the fact that a heavy user cannot achieve more than 1 Gbps of bandwidth, as shown in Fig. 5.5. Again, light users contribute very little towards total utilization of the network. As a result, while a major portion of the system capacity is wasted, heavy users dont have access to that unused bandwidth. On the other hand, a busy user in 10G-EPON can reach up to the maximum achievable system throughput (8.5 Gbps) during periods when no other trac is in the network. Under the simulation congurations explained in the previous section, the maximum bandwidth which each of the 10% heavy users can achieve is also shown in Fig. 5.5. It should be noted that, after a certain system load, the throughput of busy user goes down. As we keep increasing the system load, the trac generated by the light users also increases; as a result, the DBA allocates less bandwidth to heavy users. In other words, the provisioned bandwidth is dynamically adjusted depending on the users requirements and not necessarily by penalizing light users. Similarly, the throughput of a busy user is less in the scenario when 80% of trac is generated by 10% users, compared to the scenario where 10% of users generate 90% of trac.

5.4.3

Packet Loss Ratio per Heavy User

Another important performance parameter that has severe impact on the user experience is packet loss ratio. It is observed that heavy users in WDM PON experience severe packet loss under both load congurations. However, with linearly increasing trac load, the loss ratio does not grow linearly; in fact, the growth rate decays with increased load, as shown in Fig. 5.6. Even though the decaying factor seems advantageous, the underlying reason reveals a more serious problem for the system operations. Like other P2P system, ONUs in a WDM PON trans-

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Figure 5.5: Upstream (US) throughput of heavy user. mit in continuous mode. A packet departing from the head of the queue vacates the corresponding space in the queue. It turns out that, under heavy load, arriving packets have dierent success rates: larger packets have lower probability of nding enough free space in the queue, compared to smaller packets. Consequently, under heavy load, an ONU in a WDM PON enqueues and transmits smaller packets and selectively drops bigger packets and hence achieves comparatively lower packet loss ratio (with a saturated throughput). This "Big Packet Penalty" becomes worse with increasing load and can have severe performance impact on applications which generate only large Ethernet packets (e.g., video applications) (as shown in Fig. 5.7). With the aid of some advanced queue management techniques, such as Random Early Discard (RED), the problem can be mitigated, but it makes the system implementation more complex and expensive. On the other hand, in 10G-EPON, heavy users experience insignicant packet loss as long as the combined trac generated by all users is not enough to congest the EPON system. Figure 5.6 also shows that, af-

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Figure 5.6: Upstream packet loss ratio of a heavy user.

Figure 5.7: Upstream packet loss distribution over dierent packet sizes under 100% load at ONU. ter a certain load (84% of total EPON capacity), heavy users are restricted and start experiencing packet loss that grows linearly with increasing loads. The "Big Packet Penalty" never appears in an EPON system because ONU transmits packets in burst. After serving a burst, an EPON ONU has enough space in its queue to accommodate packets of all sizes, and does not selectively drop big packets.

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Figure 5.8: Average upstream PON delay of a heavy user.

5.4.4

Average Packet Delay per Heavy User

Average packet delay is considered to be a very important performance parameter which impacts a broadband users experience. The average delay depends on the available bandwidth, buer size, and characteristics of the user trac. As shown in Fig. 5.8, even under similar simulation congurations, heavy users in WDM PON experience signicantly higher packet delay than heavy users in an EPON system. Light users in WDM PON experience slightly lower delay compared to EPON light users, but in both cases the average delay is within 1 ms for any system load.

5.5

Conclusion

In this chapter, we compared the performance of TDM PON and WDM PON under realistic, non-uniform load conditions. Even though the results presented in this chapter are based on 10G-EPON, it is expected that similar conclusions can be drawn when performance of 10 Gbps GPON is compared to that of WDM PON. This study has shown that, while WDM PON has the potential to provide a higher aggregated capacity than TDM PON, this does not necessar-

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ily guarantee better service quality or network utilization. The virtue of sharing, which is the underlying principle of TDM PON, not only drastically reduces the cost of bandwidth and equipment, but also signicantly improves user experience. Another advantage of TDM PON is that sharing a single channel naturally supports dierentiated services (higher bandwidth to some users than others depending on the SLA (Service Level Agreement)) without stranding any network resources. On the contrary, in a WDM PON, even if some subscriber is entitled to low bandwidth according to its SLA, still a full wavelength channel needs to be allocated. It should be noted that WDM PON and TDM PON technologies do not necessarily have to be exclusive. A hybrid PON which adopts multiple channels as in WDM PON while allowing channel sharing in TDM PON could be the right solution for the ever-growing demand for bandwidth [72]. While developing such a hybrid technology could be challenging, it is hoped that the results presented in this chapter will motivate the practitioner towards investigation and developing such hybrid solutions.

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Chapter 6
Performance of 10G-EPON
6.1 Introduction

The 10 Gbps Ethernet Passive Optical Network (10G-EPON) specication, developed by the IEEE 802.3av Task Force, recently received its nal approval. While the performance of its predecessor 1 Gbps EPON, was studied in great detail [73], the 10G-EPON has introduced a number of new features, mainly related to dierent line-coding and stronger forward error correction (FEC) techniques. In this chapter, we discuss in detail all the components of 10G-EPON transmission overhead. The analysis is provided for practical deployment scenarios, based on lessons learned during mass deployment of 1G-EPON systems over the past ve years. The overhead depends on various factors, e.g., packet-size distribution and trac arrival distribution at ONUs and OLT. Also the dynamic bandwidth allocation algorithm (DBA), that assigns transmission slots to ONUs, inuences the overhead components. The interaction among the layers of the he physical stack of EPON also contributes to the performance of the whole system. Developing accurate mathematical model to capture all such factors could be challenging and intractable. As a result, in this study we developed a simulation model according to the IEEE specications and provide re-

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sults for practical deployment scenarios. The simulation results are also compared to values obtained analytically with simplied assumptions. As shown in the later sections, in most cases, analytical models give lower estimations of overhead values as intricate details are ignored in those models. Representative values for dierent system parameters of 10G-EPON devices are considered. In some cases, where commercial parts are not yet available, we had to extrapolate some of the physical parameters from 1G-EPON to 10G-EPON operations. Most such extrapolations were veried with manufacturers currently developing new 10G-EPON devices. However, for readers to be able to check performance approximately with dierent values or under a dierent set of assumptions, equations are provided for all the overhead components. The rest of the chapter is organized as follows. In Section 6.2, we present a short overview of 10G-EPON architecture. Section 6.3 shows a comprehensive listing of 10G-EPON-specic transmission overhead components and Section 6.4 discusses those overhead components in details. Illustrative numerical results from simulation of typical deployment scenarios are also presented and compared with results obtained through simplied analytical models.This chapter contains a large number of acronyms, which are expanded here for the sake of better readability and improved reader experience.

6.2

Basics of 10G-EPON Architecture

At a high level, any TDMA-based PON, such as 1G-EPON, 10G-EPON, or GPON, dynamically time-shares a single transmission channel among multiple Optical Network Units (ONUs). In the upstream direction, multiple ONUs take turn transmitting in their pre-allocated timeslots. The upstream transmission occurs in burst mode, since ONUs must only

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Table 6.1: List of acronyms used in this chapter. AGC BD BM CAZ CDR DBA DFB EOB EPON FEC HGW IPG MPCP Automatic Gain Control Burst Delimiter Burst Mode Code Alignment Zone Clock Data Recovery Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation Distribute FeedBack laser End of Burst delimiter Ethernet Passive Optical Network Forward Error Correction Home GateWay InterPacket Gap MultiPoint Control Protocol

MPCPDU MPCP Data Unit OLT ONU P2MP P2P PSD QoS RS Optical Line Terminal Optical Network Unit Point To MultiPoint Point To Point Packet Size Distribution Quality of Service Reconciliation Sublayer

enable their lasers to transmit a burst of data and disable them immediately after that. In the downstream direction, the signal from a single transmitter at the Optical Line terminal (OLT) is passively split to reach every ONU. The OLT transmitter operates in continuous mode.

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6.2.1

Ethernet Framing

Being part of IEEE 802.3 family of standards, all EPON systems use Ethernet framing, thus subscriber data exchanged between ONUs and OLT is subject to Ethernet framing overhead [73]. Ethernet encapsulation of the subscriber data (payload) is a result of adding 7- or 8-byte preamble, followed by a 14-byte Ethernet header, including source and destination addresses as well as frame type/size, and 4-byte Frame Check Sequence. Also, Ethernet frames should have at least a minimum inter-packet gap between them. Clearly, the value of Ethernet framing overhead depends on specic distribution of packet sizes [70]. Data arriving from a customer to an ONUs user port includes this overhead, as well as data that traverses Ethernet-based point-to-point (P2P) interconnects in central oces or data centers. So, this overhead is not further investigated in this study. Rather, this study focuses on additional 10G-EPON-specic overhead, which is not found in other Ethernet architectures.

6.2.2

Bandwidth Assignment Mechanism

The bandwidth assignment mechanism of 10G-EPON is similar to that of 1G-EPON. The grant/request mechanism is implemented using GATE and REPORT messages that are exchanged between OLT and ONUs [61, 74]. The overhead introduced by the GATE and REPORT messages is called control channel overhead. This overhead is inuenced by the number of scheduled ONUs and the cycle time. To study dierent QoS requirements, we consider 1, 2, 4, and 8 ms cycle times with a combination of 32, 64, 96, and 128 ONUs in an EPON.

6.2.3

Burst-Mode Operation

The new 10G-EPON specication can trace its ancestry to both 1G-EPON and 10 Gbps Ethernet P2P specications. From 1G-EPON, the new spec-

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Figure 6.1: Internal structure of the upstream channel data burst in 10G-EPON. ication has borrowed the discovery and bandwidth assignment mechanisms with virtually no changes. From 10-Gbps P2P, it borrows 64bit/66-bit line coding and interlayer interface specications. 10G-EPON adds a stronger stream-based FEC and a more robust burst structure. As was the case with 1G-EPON, the burst begins with a Laser-On interval (1 in Fig. 6.1), followed by the Automatic Gain Control (AGC) and Clock and Data Recovery (CDR) intervals (2 and 3 in Fig. 6.1). An ONU transmits a special synchronization pattern (SP) during both AGC and CDR intervals. Considering that 10G-EPON may operate with preFEC BER of 103 , it is necessary to assure that the OLT is able to reliably identify the beginning of an incoming data burst even in the presence of bit errors. It does so by hunting for the Burst Delimiter (BD) sequence (4 in Fig. 6.1), which is transmitted immediately before the beginning of the FEC-protected portion of the burst. This BD is a 66-bit sequence with a specic quality of having a very high Hamming distance from all 66-bit strings preceding it in a burst. The BD is followed by the FEC-protected portion of a burst, comprising an integer number of FEC codewords. Each FEC codeword consists of twenty-seven 66-bit blocks of payload and four 66-bit blocks of parity data. The rst two of the 27 payload blocks in the rst FEC codeword

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must contains IDLEs, to synchronize the descrambler (which is part of the physical-layer specication) and to ensure proper delineation of the rst data frame. Additionally, 10G-EPON bursts are equipped with Endof-Burst (EOB) delimiter (6 in Fig. 6.1). The EOB pattern serves as an indication to the OLT receiver that the end of the data burst from the given ONU has been found.

6.3

Components of 10G-EPON Transmission Overhead

The 10G-EPON system features a number of transmission overheads which are not present in P2P Ethernet or its predecessor 1G-EPON. It is expected that with mass production of 10G-EPON optical transmitters, many of these overhead components will be further optimized, as was the case with 1G-EPON optics. However, in this study, we will assume conservative values representative of a worst-case performance. Also the study is performed for a heavily-loaded system, i.e., a scenario where each ONU has high load. To understand the root cause of various overhead components, we need to consider a typical sequence of calculations that an ONU performs to request bandwidth, and that the OLT performs to grant the bandwidth. The bandwidth is requested and granted in units of time quanta (TQ), equal to 16 ns (or 20 bytes at 10 Gbps). To report its queue length, ONU must round-up the cumulative length of queued frames plus the associated inter-packet gap (IPG) lengths to an integer number of TQs. This rounding up results in TQ rounding overhead. The REPORT message sent by the ONU to the OLT contributes to the upstream control channel overhead. The OLT, upon receiving a REPORT from an ONU, calculates the length

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of a grant, which is increased to accommodate optical overhead and FEC parity data. The grant should allow an integer number of FEC codewords. Due to this round-up and to the fact that Ethernet frames are non-fragmentable, the last FEC codeword may remain underutilized. This unused remainder creates the FEC codeword quantization overhead. The OLT then converts the calculated grant length into units of TQ, again contributing to the TQ quantization overhead component. The grant is sent to the ONU in a GATE message, which leads to downstream control channel overhead. When an ONU begins transmission in a previously-granted slot, it starts turning the laser on, then transmits the synchronization pattern (SP), followed by burst delimiter (BD). At the end of the burst, the ONU sends end of burst delimiter (EOB), and turns the laser o. All these time intervals cumulatively contribute to the burst-mode overhead. Immediately after transmitting the BD, the ONU starts transmitting the FEC-protected user data. The rst FEC codeword always starts with two idle 66-bit blocks. These blocks create the idle-prex overhead, that is encountered once per each burst. Upon transmitting a number of blocks representing the FEC codeword payload, the ONU will transmit 4 blocks of parity data. These blocks represent FEC encoding overhead. To absorb any allowed timing variability among ONUs, the OLT DBA may allocate a special dead-zone between end of previous burst and beginning of a next burst. This interval leads to guard-band overhead. And nally, a periodic discovery process, designed to detect and accommodate newly connected ONUs, adds Discovery overhead. This overhead exists in both upstream and downstream directions, though it is dierent in each direction. Downstream overhead is caused by the pe-

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riodic discovery GATE messages. Upstream overhead is caused by periodic allocation of discovery windows, during which no registered ONUs are allowed to transmit.

6.4

Evaluation of Overheads

This section presents the above overhead components in greater detail together with the analytical methods to estimate the values of the overheads. The estimated values are compared to the values obtained through simulations.

6.4.1

Forward-Error-Correction (FEC) Overhead

To lower the cost of 10G-EPON implementations, it is crucial to nd the right balance between performance of optical transceivers and complexity of electronics. To extend the power budget while keeping the optical transceiver parameters relaxed, the 10G-EPON specication includes a mandatory FEC based on Reed-Solomon (255, 223) channel encoding. Due to insertion of the FEC parity in the data stream, part of the bandwidth is occupied by FEC encoding and is not available for subscriber data. FEC in 10G-EPON is stream based; this means that, in 10G-EPON, estimation of FEC overhead is straightforward and does not depend on packet-size distribution of the transmitted data stream. For every 27 blocks of transmitted data, FEC encoder adds 4 blocks of parity data resulting in 12.9% overhead. This transmission overhead is present in both downstream and upstream channels. However, in the upstream transmission, guard band and burst overhead are not FEC protected (Fig. 6.1), as a result the upstream FEC overhead is 12.9% (1 OBM OGB ) where OBM and OGB are burst and guard band overheads, calculated in Sections 6.4.5 and 6.4.6, respectively. Figure 6.2 shows the FEC encoding overhead for the upstream trac

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Figure 6.2: Percentage of FEC overhead in upstream channel for dierent polling cycles and number of ONUs.

for dierent number of ONUs and cycle times. It can be observed that, with increasing number of ONUs, FEC overhead decreases proportionally. As explained later, guard band and burst-mode transmission overhead (i.e., the unprotected portion of upstream channel) increases with the ONU count. As a result, FEC-protected data portion gets reduced along with FEC overhead.

6.4.2

Codeword-Quantization Overhead

To keep the FEC codeword structure simple, the 10G-EPON specication does not allow shortened FEC codewords. This means that the upstream transmission slot must be extended to include an integer number of codewords. This presents a new transmission overhead which is only present in the upstream channel. According to the 10G-EPON specication, each FEC codeword contains 216 bytes of payload, and the OLT must grant a timeslot that

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should contain an integer number of codewords. However, the variablesize Ethernet frames may not be able to completely occupy the granted timeslot. As a result, on average, half of one codeword payload remains unused during the actual transmission by an ONU. Codeword-quantization overhead is directly proportional to the number of grants per second and can be estimated as OCW = 0.5 F EC_P AY LOAD N/T . F EC_P AY LOAD denotes the size of FEC-protected data bytes in every codeword and is equal to 216 according to the IEEE 802.3av specication, N is the number of ONUs registered at the given OLT port, and T is the cycle time (cycle time is recalculated into transmitted bytes at the eective MAC layer data rate of 10 Gbps, i.e., 1 byte = 800 ps. Thus, 1 ms cycle time = 1,250,000 byte times).

Figure 6.3: Codeword-quantization overhead for various polling cycle lengths and number of ONUs.

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6.4.3

Time-Quantum Rounding Overhead

Multi-Point Control Protocol (MPCP) controls the upstream transmission channel by exchanging REPORT and GATE messages between the OLT and ONUs. A REPORT message is sent by the ONU to communicate its current queue lengths to the OLT. The OLT assigns a timeslot (length of allowed transmission window) to an ONU using a GATE message. As in 1G-EPON, 10G-EPON standard also species these exchanges to take place in units of Time Quantum (TQ). One TQ is equal to 16 ns, which at 10 Gbps is equivalent to 20 bytes. Again, the variable-size Ethernet frames may not be able to completely occupy an integer number of TQs; as a result, an ONU might report a few extra bytes to the OLT, and OLT might grant a few extra bytes to the ONU.

Figure 6.4: TQ rounding overhead in upstream channel for various polling cycle lengths and number of ONUs.

At the ONU, the overhead can vary from 0 to 19 bytes per burst; and at the OLT, the overhead can take values of 0, 4, 8, 12, and 16 bytes.

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The average TQ rounding error per burst is 9.5 + 8 = 17.5 bytes. As this overhead occurs in every burst, it is proportional to the number of grants per second, which depends on the number of registered ONUs and length of polling cycle. Thus, TQ rounding overhead OT Q = 17.5 N/T . It should be noted that TQ rounding overhead consumes bandwidth only in upstream channel. Figure 6.4 shows the overhead for dierent polling cycles and numbers of ONUs. It is conrmed from both analytical and simulation results that the eect of this overhead is insignicant in the overall performance of 10G-EPON.

6.4.4

Idle-Prex Overhead

10G-EPON ONUs must transmit two 66-bit blocks containing idle codes (16 bytes) at the beginning of the FEC-protected data portion of every upstream burst. These idle blocks are used to synchronize the descrambler and to provide packet delineation at the MAC layer of the OLT. As this overhead is present in every upstream burst, it is straightforward to estimate the total bandwidth it consumes. Like codewordrounding overhead or TQ rounding overhead, this one is also directly proportional to the number of bursts per second and can be stated as OIdle_P ref ix_OH = 16 N/T , where P REF EX_IDLE_BY T ES is the length of idle prex. Figure 6.5 shows idle-prex overhead for dierent congurations dened in Section 6.2.2. Under the most stringent setup with 128 ONUs and 1 ms cycle time, the experienced overhead is below 0.17% and can be ignored for all practical purposes.

6.4.5

Burst-Mode (BM) Transmission Overhead

The dierent components of an upstream burst were dened earlier. The major contributors to the BM transmission overhead include laser on time (LON ) and o time (LOF F ), which depend primarily on ONU laser

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Figure 6.5: Idle-prex overhead for dierent number of ONUs and cycle time.

diode and the driver circuit. Typical GPON (ITU-T G.984) or EPON (IEEE 802.3ah) lasers with legacy technology turn on and o within 5-20 ns, with state-of-the-art lasers taking only 1-3 ns. However, for the 10GEPON analysis, we have selected conservative values of 64 ns for each laser on and o periods. The other contributors are AGC period (TAGC ), and CDR period (TCDR ). Depending on the quality and implementation of the OLT burst-mode receiver, these values might vary for dierent manufacturers. However, it is expected that AC-coupled burst-mode receiver designs will be able to adjust gain and perform CDR within 400 ns [75]. Thus, the maximum BM overhead is OBM = (LON + TAGC + TCDR + LOF F + BD + EOB) N/T . Figure 6.6 presents the maximum burst-mode transmission overhead for 10G-EPON, measured for various numbers of ONUs (32 - 128) and polling cycle lengths. In extreme case (128 ONUs polled at 1ms cycle)

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Figure 6.6: Burst-mode transmission overhead for various polling cycle lengths and number of ONUs.

the overhead can reach 7%, however for all scenarios typical of current 1G-EPON deployments, this overhead does not exceed 2%.

6.4.6

Guard-Band Overhead

The IEEE 802.3av specication does not mandate any guard band (dead zone) between two consecutive upstream bursts. In fact, laser on and laser o periods of two consecutive bursts may overlap; however, since MPCP time at the OLT and ONUs is allowed some degree of variability, implementations might include a gap between bursts as a precautionary step to prevent overlap between bursts. Estimating the overhead introduced by the guard band (TGB ) (if any) is straightforward and can be expressed as OGB = TGB N/T. In simulations, a guard band of 5 TQ (80 ns) was used. Figure 6.7 presents the values of guard-band overhead for various numbers of ONUs

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Figure 6.7: Guard-band overhead for dierent number of ONUs and cycle time.

and polling cycles. Even for a relatively large guard band that was used in the simulation, the overall contribution from this overhead component is insignicant.

6.4.7

Control Overhead

The control overhead due to exchange of GATE and REPORT messages depends on the Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation (DBA) algorithm design (i.e., how many grants per GATE or how often REPORTs should be generated), as well as the number of registered ONUs and polling cycle length. To simplify our calculations, it is assumed that each GATE message carries a single bandwidth grant which includes time to transmit a REPORT message back to the OLT. The control overhead is therefore OControl = SN/T , where S denotes the size of GATE or REPORT messages including the Ethernet preamble and IPG (84 bytes).

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Figure 6.8: Control message overhead for 10G-EPON for various polling cycle lengths and number of ONUs.

Figure 6.8 presents the control message overhead (Ocontrol ) measured and calculated for dierent congurations explained in Section 6.2.2. The observed relationship is relatively simple: the larger the number of ONUs registered in the given EPON, the larger the control message overhead will be. Decrease in the polling cycle length further increases the observed control message overhead, since now more control frames will be transmitted per unit of time. In case of 64 ONUs, 1 ms polling cycle would result in a control message overhead of 0.4%, while under the same conditions, an EPON with 128 ONUs would observe control message overhead of roughly 0.9%.

6.4.8

Discovery-Process Overhead

Discovery-process overhead is the result of the discovery and registration process in 10G-EPON, as dened in the P802.3av document. The

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frequency of the discovery process as well as the size of the discovery window is not bounded by the respective standard and are considered to be implementation dependent. The issue has been addressed extensively in the literature [76] and has very insignicant inuence in the overall performance. As a result, we did not consider this overhead in this study.

6.5

Overall 10G-EPON Transmission Eciency

The upstream utilization of 10G-EPON (achieving 1 ms cycle time) varies from 85% to 78% with 32 to 128 ONUs, respectively. However, for larger cycle time, the utilization can be much higher. Table 6.2: Upstream 10G-EPON performance for 32 ONUs with 1, 2, 4, and 8 ms polling cycles. Cycle Time (ms) FEC Encoding Overhead [%] Codeword Quantization-Overhead [%] Time-Quantum Rounding Overhead [%] Idle-Prex Overhead [%] BM Transmission [%] Guard-Band Overhead [%] Control Overhead [%] Net Transmission Overhead [%] Net Throughput [Gbps] 1 12.64 0.27 0.05 0.04 1.74 0.26 0.22 15.22 8.47 2 12.77 0.14 0.02 0.02 0.87 0.13 0.11 14.06 8.59 4 8

12.84 12.87 0.07 0.01 0.01 0.43 0.06 0.05 0.03 0.005 0.005 0.21 0.03 0.03

13.48 13.19 8.65 8.68

Downstream channel in 10G-EPON allows even higher utilization, because overhead components such as codeword, TQ rounding, burstmode, guard-band, or idle-prex are not present in the downstream direction. The contributions of dierent overhead components and the

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Table 6.3: Upstream 10G-EPON performance for 128 ONUs with 1, 2, 4, and 8 ms polling cycles. Cycle Time (ms) FEC Encoding Overhead [%] Codeword-Quantization Overhead [%] Time-Quantum Rounding Overhead [%] Idle-Prex Overhead [%] BM Transmission [%] Guard-Band Overhead [%] Control Overhead [%] Net Transmission Overhead [%] Net Throughput [Gbps] 1 11.87 1.08 0.18 0.16 6.96 1.02 0.86 22.14 7.78 2 12.38 0.54 0.09 0.08 3.48 0.51 0.43 17.52 8.24 4 8

12.64 12.77 0.27 0.04 0.04 1.74 0.26 0.21 0.13 0.02 0.02 0.87 0.13 0.11

15.21 14.06 8.48 8.59

Table 6.4: Downstream 10G-EPON performance for 32 ONUs with 1, 2, 4, and 8 ms polling cycles. Cycle Time (ms) FEC Encoding Overhead [%] Control Overhead [%] Net Transmission Overhead [%] Net Throughput [Gbps] 1 2 4 8

12.903 12.903 12.903 12.903 0.21 13.12 8.68 0.11 13.01 8.69 0.05 12.95 8.7 0.03 12.93 8.71

overall utilization of both upstream and downstream direction for a typical deployment are shown in Tables 6.2-6.5. These results are also veried using detailed simulation. It should be noted that results presented here do not account for the 64b/66b line-encoding overhead. Line-encoding overhead does not consume user bandwidth available at the MAC service interface. Instead, this overhead is accommodated at the physical layer by increasing the

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Table 6.5: Downstream 10G-EPON performance for 128 ONUs with 1, 2, 4, and 8 ms polling cycles. Cycle Time (ms) FEC Encoding Overhead [%] Control Overhead [%] Net Transmission Overhead [%] Net Throughput [Gbps] 1 2 4 8

12.903 12.903 12.903 12.903 0.86 13.76 8.62 0.43 13.33 8.66 0.21 13.12 8.68 0.11 13.01 8.7

line rate by 3.125% (from 10 Gb/s at MAC sublayer to 10.3125 Gb/s at PHY sublayer). These results show that the 10G-EPON specication is very ecient and allows high utilization of both upstream and downstream channels.

6.6

Conclusion

In this chapter, we discussed in detail various components of 10G-EPON transmission overhead for both downstream and upstream channels. The analysis was carried out for practical deployment scenarios, based on lessons learned during mass deployment of 1G-EPON systems over the past ve years, providing more than 20 million of active EPON lines around the world. The results, obtained through simulations and veried through analytical calculations, show that, despite technical challenges associated with burst-mode operation at 10 Gbps speed, the 10G-EPON specication is very ecient and allows high utilization of both the upstream and the downstream channels, where the major source of transmission overhead is associated with mandatory RS(255,223) FEC encoding.

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Chapter 7
Conclusion
The dissertation makes important contributions to the study of upgrading problems of optical core and access networks. The algorithms, analysis and results presented in this dissertation would be useful in the critical decision making process of network operators and practitioners to augment capacity and resources to their operational networks. This chapter summarizes the main results and the contributions made in the dissertation. In Chapter 2, we investigated multipath provisioning in optical WDM mesh networks from a trac-engineering perspective. Our routing approach supports degraded service (vs. no service at all in case of a network element failure), namely guaranteeing a fraction of the requested bandwidth even in case of a link failure. We showed how multipath provisioning can balance the network load. We showed that the scheme performs signicantly better than conventional single-path and multipath provisioning. In Chapter 3, we demonstrated that, to facilitate network growth, attention should be directed towards critical cut sets rather than individual links. Our analysis in this chapter showed how capacity exhaustion of critical cut sets indicates urgency of the need for upgrading a mesh network. To handle trac growth, we also introduced a new parame-

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ter called network-cut exhaustion probability. This parameter is ecient and appropriate to assist incremental growth of the existing network as well as new network design. Finally, we provided an algorithm to calculate the urgency and the pointers to specic locations which requires upgrade under desired performance constraints. Chapter 4 addressed the upgrading issues from the viewpoints of two dierent business entities, namely Internet service provider (ISP) and network operator (of course, a network operator is also an ISP sometimes). We showed dierent approaches which should be employed to meet their specic goals. Our customized methods to treat such problems produced optimized solutions and achieved signicant cost savings while ensuring that neither entities have to refuse their customers for connection requests due to lack of capacity in the network. In other words, our approaches lead to highly-available network upgrade with minimized cost. It should also be noted that the underlying principles of our upgrading approaches, which enforce trac multiplexing among dierent connections, also lead to resource consolidation. As a result, our approach not only decreases operational cost (OPEX) but also ends up reducing energy usages of an operational network. In future work, it would be interesting to investigate how much OPEX savings can be achieved by consolidating resources using the underlying principles of our approach. In Chapter 5, we investigated the upgrading problem for optical access networks. We found that upgrading capacity in the access network by exploring WDM approaches might not be viable from an economic perspective. While the WDM solution has the potential to provide a higher aggregated capacity than TDM technology, this does not necessarily guarantee better service quality or network utilization. The virtue of sharing, which is the underlying principle of TDM technology, not only

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drastically reduces the cost of bandwidth and equipment, but also signicantly improves user experience. Finally, in Chapter 6, we discussed the performance of a next generation access network technology, namely 10G-EPON. We provided a detailed performance analysis of the transmission overhead for both downstream and upstream channels. The analysis was carried out for practical deployment scenarios. The results, obtained through simulations and veried through analytical calculations, showed that, despite technical challenges, the 10G-EPON specication is very ecient and allows high utilization of both the upstream and the downstream channels, and is a suitable solution as a next-generation optical access technology.

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