<![CDATA[FUTUR. Website for the scientific production of UPC researchers.]]> <![CDATA[FUTUR. Website for the scientific production of UPC researchers.]]> <![CDATA[Sustainable network infrastructure enabling the future digital society]]>  Barlet, P.; Careglio, D.; Germán Santos-Boada; Albert Cabellos-Aparicio; Akyildiz, I.F.; Cruellas, J.; Solé-Pareta, J.; Domingo, J.
Competitive project

The ICT eco-system has been rapidly and dramatically changing in the last several years. Emerging cloud services, mobile and social network technologies are creating new communication patterns, requiring architectural changes to the underlying networks in order to enable scalable growth in traffic volume, while supporting a high level of dynamic connectivity where applications and application components are frequently provisioned, released, and moved around. SUNSET project focuses on overcoming the existing bottlenecks of current architectural solutions to provide a successful support of the future Digital Society, paving the way to new-coming cloud ICT services as well as enhancing a sustainable use of these services by mature economic sectors, improving this way their competitiveness through cloud ICT technologies. More specifically, SUNSET proposes a novel architecture including all network segments (access, metro, core) and data centre network, empowered by advanced optical technologies and SDN, capable of sustaining the growing resource and operational demands of next generation networks. SUNSET pays attention both on the short and long term. As a short-term architectural solution, the SUNSET project will leverage a proper integration of advanced optical and Software Defined Networking (SDN) technologies for improving the overall performance, scalability, power efficiency and management of network and IT resources towards the processes of deploying and operating the dynamic, multitenant, and resource-savvy workloads. SDN is defined as a control framework that supports programmability of network functions and protocols by decoupling the data plane and the control plane, which are currently integrated vertically in most network equipment. The separation of control plane and data plane makes SDN the suitable candidate for an integrated control plane supporting heterogeneous technologies employed in different network layers (e.g. optical layer, IP layer) and data centres. SUNSET aims to achieve several intermediate objectives as: - Researching and developing modulation techniques and signal processing techniques for a 10x improvement in transmission data rate in metro-access networks using low cost commercial devices. - Developing SDN-enabled nodes implementing elastic wavelength and space multiplexing as well as to implement SDN controllers able to manage legacy optical equipment. - Designing and developing SDN-based orchestration frameworks, SDN-enabled monitoring capabilities, resource optimization algorithms, and investigating future SDN technologies. By achieving such objectives, SUNSET aims providing sustainable solutions by offering a network infrastructure about a factor 10 more efficient in power consumption and enhanced performance. In the long term, SUNSET also investigates further reducing power consumption and enhancing performance at larger scales higher factors of 100 to 1000 in medium-long terms, by hybrid photonic and wireless technologies towards Data-Centres-in-a-Box, supported by new nanostructured materials. Definitely, the SUNSET project brings together a combination of expertise and resources to deliver novel scalable and future-proof network overall infrastructure solutions. With its objectives, SUNSET is coordinating the research on 3 of the 6 proposed Essential Enabling Technologies for this Challenge: Information and Communication Technologies, Photonics and Nanotechnology.]]>