Nashid Shahriar, Sepehr Taeb, Shihabur R. Chowdhury, Mubeen Zulfiqar, Massimo Tornatore, Raouf Boutaba, Jeebak Mitra and Mahdi Hemmati have received the best paper award at CNSM 2019, the 15thInternational Conference on Network and Service Management.
Held from October 21 to 25, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, CNSM 2019 brought together members of academia and industry to explore the management of networks and services, pervasive systems, enterprises, and cloud computing environments.
The research team, led by Professor Boutaba, presented their award-winning paper titled Reliable Slicing of 5G Transport Networks with Dedicated Protection, which explored the reliability of 5G transport-network slices in elastic optical networks, a new generation of network that can support a flexible optical-spectrum grid and novel elastic transponder capabilities.
L to R: Professor Raouf Boutaba, Mubeen Zulfiqar, Sepehr Taeb, Shihabur Rahman Chowdhury and Nashid Shahriar. Visiting Professor Massimo Tornatore and Huawei research partners, Jeebak Mitra and Mahdi Hemmati, were unavailable for the photo.
Transport networks that employ the latest advances in elastic optical networking will form the backbone of 5G networks. Transport-network capacity must be easily partitionable to facilitate network slicing for 5G services, such as enhanced mobile broadband and ultra-reliable low latency communication. Elastic optical networks are an excellent choice for establishing transport network slices because they can tailor network resources based on service requirements.
Network slices are usually provided in the form of virtual networks, which are expected to host services at hundreds of gigabytes per second. However, because of their high data transmission rates, even a short network outage could cause traffic disruption in these slices. A solution to ensure that slices are reliable is to pre-provision back-up paths for each path used. Dedicated back-up paths can allow for fast switching within milliseconds, but they incur a significant resource overhead because they are idle when operations are free of failures. It is challenging to come up with a solution that reduces resource overhead without sacrificing the fast switching capability of dedicated protection.
“Congratulations to Raouf, his graduate students Nashid, Sepehr, Shihabur and Mubeen, his colleague Massimo and partners at Huawei on their best paper award,” said Mark Giesbrecht, Director of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science.
“Raouf and his team focused on the reliability of 5G transport-network slices in elastic optical networks, specifically the problem of slicing 5G transport networks — establishing virtual networks on 5G transport, while providing dedicated protection. Their solution was to propose a virtual-network embedding solution with dedicated protection that incorporates two techniques to decrease network-resource consumption — bandwidth squeezing to tune the amount of bandwidth guaranteed in case of failures and survivable multi-path provisioning already adopted in several network routing protocols.”
Nashid Shahriar, Shihabur Rahman Chowdhury and Mubeen Zulfiqar are current PhD students at the Cheriton School of Computer Science supervised by Professor Boutaba. Sepehr Taeb is a recent master’s graduate. Massimo Tornatore is a visiting professor from the Department of Electronics and Information in Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Jeebak Mitra and Mahdi Hemmati, from Huawei Technologies Canada, are project partners.
To learn more about this research, please see Nashid Shahriar, Sepehr Taeb, Shihabur Rahman Chowdhury, Mubeen Zulfiqar, Massimo Tornatore, Raouf Boutaba, Jeebak Mitra, and Mahdi Hemmati. Reliable Slicing of 5G Transport Networks with Dedicated Protection. 2019, 15thInternational Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM 2019) Halifax, NS, Canada.
