Scheduling Large File Transfers over High-speed Optical Circuits - 10/21/2005

Niloofar Fazlollahi

A new generation of scientific applications need to transfer huge amount of data of order of terra-bytes and at high speeds of Gbps or Mbps which is not achievable through the current packet switched internet. First, such bulk bandwidths are only available in the backbone, typically shared among number of connections that are unaware of the demands of others. Second, due to the shared nature of packet switched networks, typical internet connections exhibit complicated dynamics, and thereby lack the stability needed for control operations. So there is need for a separate optical circuit switched network which provides on-demand, dedicated, high-bandwidth channels for large data transfer. In this presentation I go through different approaches to the problem of routing and scheduling in such networks and heuristic solutions and finally compare them to the lines of the project currently being done in NISLAB by Reuven Cohen and me under the supervision of professor Starobinski.