Co-supervisor: Dr. Jing Wu.

Researcher: Mounib Khanafer.

Department: School of Information Technology and Engineering (SITE).

Research Topic

    Our main goal is to develop a new methodology to achieve inter-domain routing in Optical Networks. Inter-domain routing was extensively researched and implemented in IP networks. BGP is the principal and widely used inter-domain routing protocol in IP networks. Migrating BGP to the optical domain is the main objective of our project. We need to deal with the main differences between the optical domain and the electrical domain in order for our implementation to be successful. Moreover, we need to make sure that the scalability of BGP, one of its essential advantages, is not affected with any new methodology applied. OPNET Modeler provides powerful tools that can help a lot in our implementation. We depended mainly on the BGP simple_configuration Scenario in our work. 

We enhanced the Path Attributes of BGP to be able to handle information specific to the optical domain. We needed to change the route-selection process of BGP to comply with the new enhancements. The enhancement of BGP's Attributes generate many challenges that will affect the feasibility of our proposal. Specifically, some of these information (like the availability of wavelengths on the fibre-links) need to be refreshed continuously. This is a very big challenge that we need to deal with in order to have a valid proposal. Our proposal is still under test.