Plans for the UKLight Dark Fibre Network UKLIGHT Town Meeting National e-Science Centre, Edinburgh

1. Plans for the UKLight Dark Fibre Network UKLIGHT Town Meeting National e-Science Centre, Edinburgh

2. Setting the Scene • Today, bandwidth is the key ingredient for nearly every initiative and service within higher education institutions • Research in particular is driving the need for additional bandwidth • Advances in the tools used for teaching and learning have also driven an increase in demand beyond research • We need to get control over the infrastructure that connects our campuses and labs • Dark fibre has become the key enabler for institutions to get control over their BW needs for research, teaching and learning

3. Basic Terminology • Lit service: • Is a connection that you purchase from a telecommunications provider • A specified amount of bandwidth for a specified monthly cost • The provider handles all the elements between your campus router and the router at the destination • Dark fibre: • Is a fibre optic connection path that has not been lit • Dark fibre is something you acquire, either through buying or leasing unused fibre, or through installing new fibre • You own the path and you are responsible for the integrity of that path, and for acquiring equipment to light the fibre and make it carry information

4. Why DF? • Primary drivers: • Low cost & simplicity • Simple network design (no SDH, no ATM): Use of raw lambdas or Ethernet-Interfaces all over the place • Transparent optical paths • Network scalable to multiples of 10 Gbps or 40 Gbps with low additional cost • Natural hierarchy of technologies • DWDM on main trunk lines (128 l today, expandable if later needed) • CWDM or single GE to smaller sites off the backbone • Long living infrastructure, no need to change provider every couple of years • Interruptions mainly due to planned maintenance • True fiber cuts are rare, but last for hours if not days (e.g. fiber on high voltage power lines, fiber along railway) • Independence of carrier market

5. Why DF? • Long term benefits: • Liberating effect on users and applications constrained by BW • Organizations increase their performance and availability by sharing infrastructure and resources with other organizations/institutes • i.e. creation of virtual laboratories, libraries, remote instrumentation • Radical change to the current Telecom model • Customer-empowered and customer-controlled network models • Extending the Internet model of peering autonomous networks from the logical to the physical layer: • hundreds of "customer-owned " networks interconnected by "customer-owned" wavelengths on long-haul DWDM systems

6. Pros and Cons of DF Networks Pros () & Cons (Χ)

7. Who Needs DF Networks • Corporations with high Bandwidth requirements, hospitals, banks • Reduce the cost of line rentals • Security - reliability • Future increase of BW / network updates • Improve client-business relations (online products, services) • Storage – computational - visualization – media facilities • Variety of speed connections with respect of the equipment used (2.5Gb/s – 10Gb/s) • Offer greater variety of services without restriction by the carriers infrastructure • Research Facilities – Universities – Colleges • Experimental test-beds – new technologies protocols and applications • Distributed resources (libraries, databases, computing facilities)

8. DF Fundamental Enabler of Research • Researchers around the world are acquiring DF or dedicated wavelengths on DF for specific experiments and Grids • We are currently creating a pool of wavelengths and fibres dedicated to specific applications the same way we have today a pool of distributed computing and storage resources • Without fibre and wavelength resources research communities will be unable to support their future computational and communication needs

9. Why DF will become the 21st Century Driver for Computing Optical fibre (bits/sec double every 9 months) Source: Scientific American Data Storage (bits per square inch double every 12 months) Silicon Computer Chips (Number of transistors double every 18 months) Optical Technologies offer huge capacity at relatively cost Bandwidth is getting cheaper and faster than storage and storage is getting cheaper and faster than computing. It makes sense to use BW in order to conserve silicon area and transistors

10. Examples of DF Networks for the Research Community The SURFnet6 Network I-WIRE

11. UKLight International and Phases 1 & 2 ULCC - LAB C&NLMANLancaster Leeds C-PoP WarringtonC-PoP YHMANLeeds NNWManchester ReadingC-PoP Leased Bandwidth EastNet Cambridge CLRC-RAL St Pancras 10G 10G 10G 10G ULCC Amsterdam Chicago 10G

12. UKLight Dark Fibre Network: Phases 1&2 LEANET Fibre UKLight DF Fibre Connection to other facilities UKLight International nodes & connectivity to international exchanges Leeds Lancaster Manchester eMerlin fibre eMerlin fibre Aston Cambridge Adastral Park CCLRC-RAL Essex Reading Starlight Netherlight UCL Southampton

13. UKLight DF for UK Photonics Research Ultrafast links and switches for OTDM routing Low cost links for 40 Gb/s Quantum dot based switches, amplifiers and routers for ultrabroadband WDM operation 4x160 Gb/sec OTDM test-bed Recirculating loop Raman amplifiers BT Labs CIP (Centre of Integrated Photonics) Agile WDM channel generation (< 10 ns) Optical regenerators (10 & 40 Gb/s) DWDM Wavelength Routers WDM test beds for 10, 40, 160 Gb/s Optical regeneration OCDMA test bed Cambridge Aston UKLight DF Wavelength routed test-bed Optical packet core router and edge interfaces 160 Gb/sec OTDM facility Essex International UCL Southampton

14. The Optical Network Will Create the Backbone for High Performance-Data Intensive Grid Computing GUNI GRNI Applications & Middleware Computing clusters and storage C O N T R O L P L A N E l-switching or hybrid solutions Optical switching interfaces signalling & monitoring WDM links Dynamic optical network Optical burst switching Optical packet switching

15. Proposal for a Network Demonstrator Data Intensive Users R S N I Agile Interface UKLight DF Links MEM+SOA based optical routers with signal monitoring & selective O-E-O & optical regeneration Data Intensive Users RSNI Agile OBS Interface msec agility OPS: Optical Packet Switching OBS: Optical Burst Switching SOA: Semiconductor Optical amplifier RSNI: Resource Scheduling Interface RANI: Resource Allocation Interface ASTON >40 Gbit/sec msec agility RANI Cambridge UCL Computational resources l/OBS/OPS >10 Gbit/sec msec agility Agile Interface Peering optical router Data Network OADM Electrical Telecom Subnetwork (Adastral Park) OPS Agile Interface OADM Essex OADM RANI OADM UK Social Sciences Data Archive 10-40 Gbit/sec nsec agility Fast reconfigurable OADMs

16. OXCs Node Control 1 Input Output Monitoring Conditioning N OWS Tx Rx Selective Regeneration Rx Tx

17. Optical Packet Router

18. Agile Optical Interface for l and Sub-l Granularities Precise Current Source Reflector Impedance High - Precision Gain matching DAC 2 GCSR LASER FPGA Controller + Impedance Phase High - Precision Wavelength matching DAC Coupler Lookup Table TEC Control High - Precision Impedance DAC matching Laser controller module

19. Thank you! dsimeo@essex.ac.uk