6.442  Optical Networks

This course will introduce the fundamental and practical aspects of optical network technology, architecture, design and analysis tools and techniques.  The treatment of optical networks will be from the architecture and system design points of view.  Optical hardware technologies will be introduced and functionally abstractized as fundamental network building blocks on which optical transmission systems and network architectures are based.  In the physical layer, the course will treat the new carrier class coherent optical communication systems and all-optical-switched networks as the building blocks for new network architectures of the future that can efficiently support orders of magnitude increase in rate and highly bursty unscheduled transmission as seen in cloud computing and data storage.  In addition to the Physical Layer, the higher network layers: Media Access Control, Network Routing and Transport Layers, will be considered together as integral parts of network design.  Performance metrics, analysis and optimization techniques will be developed to help guide the creation of high performance complex optical networks.  This year we will add to the course the new approaches for efficient architecture constructs for an agile network control plane that is critical to the future networks as they become higher speeds and traffic requests will be much larger and more dynamic. New topics will include optical network security and a new economical and green transport mechanism “Optical-Flow-Switching” presented with applications such as cloud computing, data center interconnection networks and service oriented architectures.