Principal
Investigators
Recent
Program Accomplishments
1997
Goals
Commercialization
Efforts
This program is intended to address the critical needs of the Department of Defense in Command, Control, Communications, Computers, and Information (C4I) towards the year 2000. A primary goal of the project is to resolve the outstanding technological and network control issues required for the timely introduction of SONET OC-192 (10 Gb/s) systems. In addition, the project will pioneer the development of technologies required to design and demonstrate a 10 Gb/s SONET self-healing ring transmission system. Another goal is to contribute to the creation of national and international standards, and develop commercial products for 10 Gb/s SONET transmission, instrumentation and testing. The Consortium will also deliver a 622 Mb/s SONET ATM switch interface to allow a scalable gigabit ATM switch, developed under a previous ARPA ITO contract, to be connected to the 10 Gb/s SONET ring.
The SONET OC-192 TRP Testbed program is partially funded by the Information Technology Office (ITO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation with matching funds from the six Consortium members.
Phase I of the base program consists of experimentally prototyping the key enabling optical and electronic subsystems required to implement the testbed. These subsystems include the SONET OC-192 laser transmitter and receiver and supporting optical systems experiments needed to understand and design 10Gb/s optical networks. Also included is the demonstration of 9.953 Gb/s SONET multiplexing, framing, and phase aligner integrated circuits using the Heterojunction Bipolar Technology (HBT) of Rockwell International, and prototyping experimentally the intermediate speed multiplexer required for complete byte-multiplexing. The feasibility of byte multiplexing, the preferred multiplexing technology for SONET systems, will be demonstrated. Concurrently, SONET OC-192 standards and requirements, and methodology and instrumentation for product analysis and interoperability testing, will also be developed to support the overall industry goal of system interoperability.
Phase II consists of implementing a 3-node self-healing ring in Austin Texas and conduct SONET OC-192 control and operations experiments. The ring will subsequently serve as a national testbed for SONET/ATM high-bandwidth application research.
Phase III consists of work with Washington University to explore the use of SONET transmission facilities for carrying ATM signals at gigabit rates consisting of the prototyping and integration of an OC-12c network interface to the gigabit ATM switch of Washington University and conducting applications experiments using the OC-12c interface.
The final options phase extends the testbed to support a 10Gb/s ATM virtual path (VP) self-healing
ring and explores passive optical path protection. This innovative architecture can achieve greater
bandwidth efficiency while maintaining the simplicity of the SONET ring network. In addition, key applications
will be demonstrated by conducting distributed battlefield simulation experiments over the testbed for
the DoD in a collaboration with the Applied Research Laboratories and the University of Texas in Austin.
Such applications are currently limited by saturation of the existing ATM network capacity. Washington
University's high-bandwidth Image Space Navigator application for medical and satellite image analysis
will also be demonstrated. In addition, the program will investigate and demonstrate the reliable mobility
management feature of the ATM transport platform that is needed to support battlefield teleconferencing
applications.
Principal
Investigators
Recent
Program Accomplishments
1997
Goals
Commercialization
Efforts
Information on other topics relating to "information superhighway" technology and projects are available from the following sources.
Washington
University Gigabit ATM Switch
1996 High
Performance Computing & Communications Blue Book
Other
related DARPA 1996 Project Summaries