ONFIRE - Future Optical Networks for Innovation, Research and Experimentation

The ONFIRE (Future Optical Networks for Innovation, Research and Experimentation) project is a Marie Sk?odowska-Curie Action as an Innovative Training Network (ITN) European Industrial Doctorates (EID) offering two Early Stage Research (ESR) positions to be conducted in both Spain and Germany. ONFIRE participating organizations are CTTC Research Center located in Castelldefels (Spain), NOKIA Bell Labs company located at Stuttgart (Germany) and UPC University located at Barcelona (Spain).

The ONFIRE project will focus on exploiting, from both a hardware and software solutions perspective, the flexibility and modularity provided by two key topics: disaggregated optical networks and cognitive optical networks. Thereby, the ultimate goal is to leverage open source software solutions running on inexpensive commodity hardware to reduce both CapEx and OpEx when automatizing network operations. Specifically, ONFIRE will target:

• Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) concepts to deploy a unified control scheme across heterogeneous transport network segments and distributed cloud infrastructures.

• Elastic interfaces and programmable white boxes.

• Cost-effective subsystems for non-intrusive in-band monitoring of advanced modulation formats.

• Data mining techniques to leverage massive physical layer monitoring data in coherent interfaces, white boxes and monitoring subsystems, to adjust and re-optimize network settings.