News 2024

“Travel Grant” Award, IEEE ANTS:

December 15th to 18th, 2024: Mrs. Ritanshi Agarwal, member of the Communications Network Chair (COMNET), participated at the IEEE ANTS conference, hosted in the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati (IITG), India. She presented her paper entitled “Infrastructure Cost Savings with Unbalanced PONs in Rural Areas” as well as a demo on “Unbalanced PON Planning Tool for Rural Areas”. Her work showed a cost-effective Passive Optical Network architecture for rural areas, which consists on cascading optical taps in a daisy chain. The demo showed the planning tool developed with PyQt5, which supports different architectures and areas. Mrs. Agarwal was awarded the “Travel grant” award.
Link to the conference

ITG Workshop FONDAC:

December 4th, 2024: The Communications Network Chair hosted at the UniBw München campus, the ITG Workshop “FONDAC: Future optical networks design and control”. This workshop aimed for PhD students to share their studies and results and get ideas from several industry and operator presentations. The event was organized by Prof. Carmen Mas-Machuca (UniBw), Prof. Thomas Bauschert (TU Chemnitz) and Prof. Andreas Kirstädter (Universität Stuttgart). This Workshop counted with an invited talk by Andreas Gladisch from Deutsche Telekom titled “Energy consumption in optical networks”.
Link to the event

Front-Runner Meeting:

November 26th & 27th, 2024: The Communications Network Chair hosted the BMBF FRONT-RUNNER meeting at UniBw München. The project partners ADTRAN SE, BISDN Gmbh, Fraunhofer HHI attended the meeting and shared results and research plans for the last year of the project.
Link to the project

Publication at the ITGNews 04/2024

October 2024: The new issue of the INFORMATIONSTECHNISCHE GESELLSCHAFT IM VDE contains an article on “Research and developments in optical communication networks” by Prof. Carmen Mas Machuca (pages5-7). Current deployment of optical networks covers worldwide more than 16 million kilometers in new sectors like data centers, and intercontinental communications (submarine and satellite), which has expanded their versatility, usefulness, and value. In all segments (transport, metro, access), optical networks continue to face challenges towards high-capacity architectures with low energy consumption, limited cost, high reliability, guaranteed security and sovereignty, etc. Future optical networks must be capable of supporting all of the aforementioned capabilities, while facilitating interoperability among vendors and enabling operators to offer new services with sovereignty and trustworthiness.
Link to the document

Women in Photonics event at ECOC 2024

September 25th, 2024: Dr. Anjali Sharma, Prof. Anna Lena Schall-Giesecke, Dr. Elena Nöke and Prof. Carmen Mas Machuca have organized the “Women in Photonics” Panel and Luncheon at ECOC 2024. The topics this year was Empowerment Bridge: Taking Cognizance from Leading Ladies in Photonics and Optics. The panelists Camille-Sophie Bres (EPFL), Myriam Recha (Google), Claudia Hoessbacher (Polariton) and Julie Eng (Coherent Corp) shared their experiences driven by discussion lead by Dr. Michela Svaluto Moreolo (CTTC). After the exciting panel, the participants enjoyed more discussions over a lunch sponsored by Optica.
Link to the event

Best Paper Award IEEE CQR 2024

September 12th, 2024: Shakthivelu Janardhanan, Ph.D. student of Prof. Carmen Mas Machuca, received the best student paper award for the paper “PyRBD: An Open-Source Reliability Block Diagram Evaluation Tool". The award criteria was the paper quality as well as the presentation.
Reliability Block Diagrams (RBDs) are pictorial representations that evaluate a system’s availability by considering its components and their interconnections. This work presents and evaluates an open-source tool, PyRBD, to (i) generate RBDs from topologies, (ii) decompose RBDs for faster processing, and (iii) calculate flow availabilities.
This work has been funded by the Bavarian Ministry of Economic Affairs, Regional Development, and Energy under the project ‘6G Future Lab Bavaria’ as well as the BMBF FRONT-RUNNER project (grant ID 16KISR009).
Link to the conference

ONDM 2024 in Madrid (Spain)

The 28th International Conference in Optical Network Design and Modeling (ONDM) was organized by UC3M, Madrid (Spain) from May 6th to May 9th, 2024. The General Chair David Larrabeiti-López with the TPC Chairs Luca Valcarenghi, Carmen Mas-Machuca, and José A. Hernández-Gutiérrez successfully prepared an excellent program covering cutting-edge research in established areas of optical networking and their adoption in support of a wide variety of new services and applications. This included the most recent trends such as 5G and beyond; data-centre networking; Internet of things; cloud/edge computing; content delivery; big data, data analytics, network telemetry, and real-time monitoring; autonomic networking; artificial intelligence / machine learning assisted networks; visible light networks; and quantum secured networks.
Link to the conference

Opening ICIN'24 session

March 11th-14th, 2024: Prof. Carmen Mas Machuca as TPC Co-Chair of the 27th Conference on “Innovation in Clouds, Internet and Networks” (ICIN 2024), has participated at the opening session. ICIN 2024 has taken place in Paris (France) and this particular edition was focused on the emergence and future developments of “Intelligent network service management across the compute continuum”. Since 1989, ICIN conferences have gathered global Internet and Telecom experts from industry, academia, and government. Renowned for identifying research challenges and industry trends, ICIN fosters interdisciplinary collaboration and idea exchange in cloud networking and Internet communities.