OptIPuter: Enabling advanced applications with novel optical control planes and backplanes

Many emerging and anticipated advanced applications have demanding requirements that cannot be supported using traditional communication services, architecture, and technologies. Such requirements include those related to high performance, large scale data volume transport, dynamic provisioning, path flexibility, and stringent determinism for all service parameters. The OptIPuter research initiative was established to investigate the potential for meeting these and other exceptional challenges by creating new types of communication services that could be implemented as complements to traditional approaches and, in some special cases, as alternatives. In particular, the OptIPuter initiative has been exploring advanced communication services based on individually addressable, dynamically allocated lightpaths. These approaches require novel control plane and backplane architecture and technology. As part of its core research agenda, the OptIPuter initiative designed and deployed such architecture and technology, which is described here along with a large scale testbed implementation, including national and international extensions. This testbed was used for a series of experiments, and the results are summarized.