Network control and management for the Next Generation Internet

The Next Generation Internet Initiative was launched in the U.S. to advance key networking technologies that will enable a new wave of applications on the Internet. Now, in its third year, the program has launched and fostered over one hundred new research projects in partnership with academic, industrial and government laboratories. One key research area that has been emphasized within the program is the next-generation optical networking. Given the ever increasing demand for network bandwidth, and the recent phenomenal advances in WDM technologies, the Next Generation Internet is expected to be an IF-based optical WDM network. As IP over WDM networking technologies mature, a number of important architectural, management and control issues have surfaced. These issues need to be addressed before a true Next Generation Optical Internet can emerge. This paper provides a brief introduction to the overall goals and activities of DARPA's NGI program and describes the key architectural, management, and control issues for the Optical Internet. We review the different IP/WDM networking architectural models and their tradeoffs. We outline and discuss several management and control issues and possible solutions related to the configuration, fault, and performance management of IP over dynamic WDM networks. We present an analysis and supporting simulation results demonstrating the potential benefits of dynamic IP over WDM networks. We then discuss the issues related to IP/WDM traffic engineering in more detail, and present the approach taken in the NGI SuperNet Network Control and Management Project funded by DARPA. In particular, we motivate and present an innovative integrated traffic-engineering framework for re-configurable IP/WDM networks. It builds on the strength of Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) for fine-grain IP load balancing, and on the strength of Re-configurable WDM networking for reducing the IP network's weighted-hop-distance, and for expanding the bottleneck bandwidth.