Researchers: Xavi Masip
Duration of the Project: from January 2010 to December 2012
An essential point while designing the new multidomain network paradigm is to appropriately decide where to allocate and implement the new protocols and features, so as to best fit the expected functionality from this new network architecture. Currently, the physical (optical transport) layer is intelligent enough to endow the network with services that were not conceived some years ago, including enhanced control plane functionalities such as the advertisement of end-to-end routes, QoS routing techniques, etc. This fact indicates that the architectural design must explicitly consider the capabilities and functionality present in both network layers (packet and transport), leading to a joint and multilayer design of the network, so as to optimize both the allocation of functions as well as the required interactions among them. This project aims to elaborate on the multilayer design of a new architecture for multi-domain networks. This architecture will be evaluated and rigorously validated. The main objective of this project is to design a functional architecture focusing on: i) the required mechanisms providing vertical coordination between the packet and transport layers, ii) a new routing paradigm for multidomain networks, addressing the well-known issues in the area, analyzing the potential interaction with the current routing protocol (BGP) in the short-term and even its replacement in a long-term scenario, iii) proposals addressing the overload of the IP addressing scheme semantics, in line with the initiatives recently started by the RRG of the IRTF.