Partner und Internationale Organisationen
(Englisch)
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Compagnie IBM France (F), National Technical University Athens (GR), Siemens AG (D), GEC-Marconi Materials Technology (UK), GPT Limited (UK), British Telecommunications plc (UK), Siemens Atea (B), Italtel Spa (I), Nortel Technology
Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (CH), Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (OH), Universität Dortmund (D), IBM Zurich Research Laboratory (CH)
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Abstract
(Englisch)
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The overall goal of the ACTS AC069 COBNET (Corporate Optical Backbone Network) project was to develop and verify in a field trial the architectural and technological concepts for the next generation of high-performance corporate networks taking advantage of evolving photonic technologies complementing the existing switching, routing and multiplexing techniques.
The requirements of future corporate backbones are very high capacity, a clear-channel capability supporting multiple protocols and bit rates, a simple, manageable and highly reliable network structure, and very low cost. The corporate backbone architecture developed in COBNET meets these requirements through the choice of the add/drop ring concept based on wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) and/or optical space division multiplexing (SDM). The COBNET developments incorporate a number of new concepts and improved technological components which were successfully verified by the construction of a demonstrator network comprising COBNET WDM and SDM rings embedded in a realistic field trial encompassing two distant sites interconnected via a WDM wide area link.
The demonstrator and its components were built and tested in two stages, an early Mark I version with reduced functionality allowing issues to be learned and trial work to be started, and a Mark II version with final specifications, deployed in the final trial. Both stages included phases of initial design, component development, control and network management software development, subsystem and node integration, as well as integration testing and measurements. The field trial included the establishment of an SDH, ATM, IP and LAN networking infrastructure complementing the COBNET optical backbone layer, as well as exercising the network with applications such as video conferencing and video-on-demand from project ACO11 AMUSE together with other commercial applications. In parallel, COBNET performed theoretical studies on the techno-economic environment of COBNET-like networks and performed modeling work and simulations of optical network variants in order to better understand system scalability and to complement measurement results. The achievements of the project have been documented through numerous deliverables, evaluation reports, publications and patents. The results of COBNET were presented to the European Commission and to over thirty VIPs from the partner companies and from other interested parties through the final demonstration which was organized in the form of an Open Day held on 26 November 1998 at the BT Laboratories in the United Kingdom. The EC audit team has ranked the project results among the four best among 23 photonic projects.
The COBNET project was technically co-ordinated by the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory. IBM's specific contributions to COBNET included the definition of the general architecture, the development of planar lightwave add/drop components for the WDM rings and of a flexible hybrid cross-connect switch as well as the techno-economic studies. The COBNET work allowed IBM to gain comprehensive skills in WDM technology, a field which is expected to revolutionize broadband communications in the future. A highlight of IBM's achievements is the WDM add-after-drop component fabricated for COBNET in Zurich. It is the first practical add/drop device that is tuneable thanks to a cascaded Mach-Zehnder structure with thermal heaters. This concept has only become feasible on a compact chip thanks to IBM's newly developed SiON waveguide process technology. The device has negligible add-to-drop crosstalk due to its add-after-drop concept and is polarization independent. The thermal tuning capability in conjunction with sophisticated control algorithms for the individual heaters provide also a unique flexibility for the optimization of the filter characteristics and will potentially allow also novel versions of other widely-used filter functions in optical communications.
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