Online Seminar: 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 the underlying algorithmic complexities. Reconfigurable topologies are not a plug and play solution and I will therefore outline several future research directions.

Bio: Klaus-Tycho Foerster is a Postdoc at the University of Vienna in Austria, after being a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research, Redmond, and a Postdoc at Aalborg University in Denmark. His research interests are at the intersection of Computer Networks, Distributed Systems, and Algorithms, with a recent focus on reconfigurable topologies and resiliency, recognized with best paper awards at IEEE SRDS 2019 and IFIP Networking 2019. He received his PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich, Switzerland (2016), advised by Roger Wattenhofer.