Mohammed Al-Momin
Start date: 1st January 2010
Email: Mohammed.Al-Momin@brunel.ac.uk
Supervisor: Prof. John Cosmas
PhD Research Title: QoS Content Oriented Routing in Optical Computer Networks
In spite of the extensive studies on routing over optical fibres, the currently used routing protocols still suffer from fatal drawbacks. Each of these drawbacks should be studied and addressed individually in order to reach to an extent of development that can meet the future Internet requirements. Some of these disadvantages are related to the optical cable itself such as how to distribute the cable’s wavelengths among the different traffic types in an optimal manner so that the data blocking operations are minimised and High degree of QoS are achieved. A lot of researches have been dedicated to minimise the number of blocking operations, but how to compromise this with QoS routing.
Other disadvantages are general for all networks types no matter what is the kind of medium that connects the different nodes, such as the lack of routing table scalability. For instance, the number of Internet users is dramatically increasing, where one can imagine this increase we he knows that the world Internet population has doubled in the last only five years. How huge will be routing table to addresses all these internet resources? Another problem rises from the amount of data such a huge population downloads and uploads over the network. How to manage this huge amount traffics in a way that guarantees an acceptable QoS for all application types. The equality in dealing with different traffic types is a major problem in the Best Effort routing protocol used commonly nowadays in Internet.
QoS routing protocols used nowadays on optical cables lacks an important QoS factor which is the information security. Researches on optical network has either focused on securing the whole optical network in the time that most of the traffic transmitted over the network do not belong to private information, and do not need that level of security which costs too much. On the other hand, some other researchers dedicated their efforts to improve the QoS, but they have forgotten the security as one of the crucial QoS factors. No researches have been dedicated to examine the feasibility of partially securing the network’s links, maybe only the main backbone of the network or more likely only a few wavelengths from all the optical links connecting the network’s nodes, to offer an acceptable range of security for some private communications needed to take place over the network.
We will attempt to address these issues in this project by proposing a flow model that uses OpenFlow routers to send data in units of flows instead small packets in a trial to reduce the routing table entries, where flows will be globally addressed to main Regional Area Network (RAN) routers instead of individual PCs. The optical network backbone will serve like highways for the flow units, and each OpenFlow router within that backbone will serve as a border router and a service gateway to the individual users within its RAN. Moreover, a new routing technique that differentiates among the different traffic types and chooses a proper routing algorithm for each of these types has been proposed in this project. This can be achieved by a minor change in the architecture of the currently used routers by cooperation between application layer and network layer in the TCP/IP layered model. By this way the router would be smart enough to recognise the different traffic types and assign a suitable routing algorithm for each type aiming to improve the QoS for each traffic type rather than satisfying with compromised QoS requirements for all the types of traffics which will in average improve the overall QoS slightly. Oyster optics technology was used here together with swarm based routing to solve the problem of Routing and Wavelength Assignment (RWA) in multiple wavelength optical cables in a manner that it tries to achieve less data blocking operations and an acceptable QoS.
Figure 1: QoS Content Oriented Routing in Optical Networks
Publications:
- Mohammed Al-Momin, John Cosmas, Kassim Al-Hassani, Saffa Jassim, “Policy Based Management of Optical Fiber Networks Carrying Multiple Application Traffic”, Iraqi Second Communications Conference, March 2011.
- Mohammed Al-Momin, John Cosmas, and Saman Amin “Adaptive Three-Layer Weighted Links Routing Protocol for Secure Transmission over Optical Networks”, WSEAS transactions on communications, Issue 8, Volume 11, pp. 287-298, August 2012.
