News 2023

Best student paper award at IEEE CQR2023

October 24th, 2023, Shakthivelu Janardhanan, Ph.D. student of Prof. Carmen Mas Machuca, received the best student paper award for the paper “Zohra: Joint Routing and Manufacturer Assignment Problem". The award criteria was the paper quality as well as the presentation.
Network operators use components from multiple manufacturers to avoid a dependency on one manufacturer. This manufacturer diversity triggers a new problem in appropriately placing the components from different manufacturers in the topology, considering their cost and availability. This work aims to solve the Joint Routing and Manufacturer Assignment (JRMA) problem, where the operator’s purchase cost does not exceed the budget while network availability is maximized using a Non-Linear Program (NLP). Zohra, the proposed solution, is applied to different topologies and traffic matrices and compared with other simpler centrality metrics-based heuristics, showing Zohra’s advantage.
This work has been funded by the Bavarian Ministry of Economic Affairs, Regional Development, and Energy under the project ‘6G Future Lab Bavaria’.

Invited talk from Prof. Carmen Mas Machuca at ECOC 2023

October 4th, 2023, Prof. Carmen Mas Machuca, director of the Chair of Communication Networks at the University of the Bundeswehr Munich has held an invited talk on “Planning and Optimization of Optical Networks based on Emerging Technologies” during ECOC 2023, the Europe’s leading conference on optical communications, and one of the most prestigious and long-standing events in the field worldwide.
The presentation address how current optical networks can keep increasing their capacity with different emerging technologies such as multi-wavelength transponders, multi-band systems and probabilistic shaping. The impact of those technologies on the planning, efficiency and cost was evaluated and addressed from a long-haul optical transport network operator’s perspective. The work has been partially funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under the project FRONT-RUNNER (Grant IDs:16KISR009).