Talk: Towards Reconfigurable Optical Networks: Opportunities and Challenges

Title: Towards Reconfigurable Optical Networks: Opportunities and Challenges

Abstract: Emerging optical technologies enable communication networks to be physically reconfigurable, adapting to current workloads and failures. Optical networks further have the potential of providing higher bandwidth at a lower cost than traditional electronic packet switching, making them a natural choice for next-generation networks. However, these benefits come with new challenges, in particular the need for fundamentally new algorithmic ideas.

In this talk, I will present some recent results on how to efficiently leverage such physical reconfiguration, even across wide-area networks, but also discuss underlying algorithmic complexities. Reconfigurable topologies are not a plug and play solution and I will therefore outline future research directions.

Short CV: As of 2018, Klaus-Tycho Foerster is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna, Austria, working with Stefan Schmid. In 2017 he was a postdoc at Aalborg University, Denmark. He was a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research, Redmond, USA, working with Ratul Mahajan for Fall 2016. He received his PhD degree from ETH Zurich in September 2016, supervised by Roger Wattenhofer in the Distributed Computing Group, supported by Microsoft Research. (↗ Extended CV)

Room: 1977

Time: Monday 17th February, 2020, 14:30