ATDNet/MONET at OFC 2000

The MONET program ended, but the MONET/ATDNet network continues to be a very active applications and optical network research environment. The MONET/ATDNet OFC’2000 demonstration provided an illustration of the continuing activities and capabilities of the testbed and delivered a visual answer to the question, "What could you do with all this bandwidth?"

The ATDNet/MONET research community partnered with MIT Lincoln Laboratories BoSSNET researchers to deliver 8 wavelengths from Washington, DC directly to the OFC 2000 Exhibit floor to provide a first hand visual demonstration of the capabilities of transparent optical networking. The total capacity delivered to the convention center floor exceeded 17 Gigabits-per-second (Gb/s) aggregate, including applications that made use of IP, ATM and direct optical transparent network interfaces. Sustained utilization was in excess of 10.5 Gb/s. The capacity delivered included roughly 2.5 Gb/s packet over SONET, 10 Gb/s ATM and 4.5 Gb/s of direct optical bandwidth. The packet over SONET connection provided connectivity to OFC for several DARPA NGI Supernet activities. The ATM and direct transparent optical connections provided full quality (uncompressed - SMPTE 292M) High Definition Motion Imagery (HDTV), including feeds from the Naval Research Laboratory’s Center for Computational Science (NRL/CCS) and the National Security Agency's Laboratory for Telecommunications Science (NSA/LTS). Three live interactive visualization feeds in HDTV format were generated real-time from NRL’s SGI Monster Infinite Reality Engine (3x IR2). The SGI Space to Face demo was featured and was remotely controlled from the showroom floor via an O2 running teleffect. Two additional live HDTV feeds came from 720/60p HDTV cameras at NRL. NSA’s LTS also provided a live camera feed of 720/60p HDTV into the show floor. A variety of IP and direct ATM applications were aggregated simultaneously on the ATM portion of the connectivity. These included POTS, voice, compressed high definition video, standard video, and other data from NRL, NSA and other ATDNet locations at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA).

The figure above presents a high level view of the entire demonstration configuration including the primary applications and the MONET/ATDNet and BoSSNET connectivity. In addition to the infrastructure provided by Bell Atlantic to ATDNet and by Qwest to BoSSNET, MMFN and AT&T provided fiber connectivity in Baltimore.

This demonstration exercised a large fraction of the resources of the MONET/ATDNet testbed. Figure 34 provides a snapshot of the wavelength utilization among the sites involved. To make the connection to BoSSNET required use of the DARPA transport interface normally connected to DISA. To properly interface this equipment to BoSSNET required removal of the amplifier stabilizing signal from the transmit interface and re-insertion into the receive interface due to the same compatibility issue discussed in the overview above. The equipment need to accomplish this was borrowed from the DIA to NRL connection (OC-48c ATM connectivity was maintained through a single wavelength link). The BoSSNET connection from Washington, DC to Baltimore was about 70 km and included mid-span amplifier locations. At the convention floor, we used OLS-40 equipment provided by Lucent to terminate the multi-wavelength optical link. To deliver 8 wavelengths from an 8 wavelength optical network required a significant capability for wavelength adaptation. The ATM switches and HDTV optical transmitters at NSA, NASA, and NRL were equipped with MONET compliant interfaces but conflicts between the wavelengths available required use of several means for wavelength adaptation. Two of the four ATM sources at NRL and the two HDTV/MONET sources were adapted to needed wavelengths using non-compliant interfaces (NCIs) in the east ring network elements. Only three NCIs were available at NRL so one of the HDTV/MONET sources originated at NRL using a compliant source on lambda 8 and was adapted to lambda 5 at NASA. Another of the ATM connections was mapped from lambda 6 to lambda 5 within the DARPA network element.

Bringing the full configuration up during the last days before the opening of the OFC exhibit proved challenging with numerous compounding equipment and fiber issues requiring isolation and resolution before full connectivity could be secured. All of the ATDNet agencies and industry partners contributed in ways that were critical to overcoming the array of hurdles to get the job done. Seven of the eight wavelengths were operational on the first day of the exhibits and error free operation of the last wavelength was obtained on the second day of the exhibit. The reward was a clear picture of the rewards of the sustained MONET effort from the time that the objectives were fantastic to the very productive and successful conclusion.