september 2008 Issue
The Summit Series
Network, Heal Thy Self
This fabric of interconnected fibre optic strands of glass is a critical but vulnerable infrastructure, now akin to power, water and transportation infrastructure in importance. A huge effort goes into making sure it almost never fails.
Fibre-optic networks have become critical infrastructure — webs of lifelines that keep modern society functioning. But what happens when they fail? The research of Summit Award winner Dr. Wayne Grover, P.Eng., hones in on the self-healing of these networks, in the wake of his development of the paradigm-shifting p-Cycle system
BY FRANCINE MAXWELL
The PEGG
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NETWORK DOCTOR |
It all seemed so straightforward. Go to university, get the right degrees for the chosen career and then go to work. Sounds simple, right?
But for Wayne Grover, P.Eng., nothing about his job as an engineer, professor, researcher and inventor is straightforward or simple. And he wouldn’t change it for anything.
“I can’t think of anything else I could have been. I knew right away in my undergraduate program at Carleton that engineering was the career for me,” says Dr. Grover.
The creator of 33 patented inventions, 73 journal publications and five book chapters, in addition to 150 technical reports, Dr. Grover is well recognized for his work. The University of Alberta professor doubles as the chief scientist for the Network Systems Research Group at TRLabs.
He is also the 2008 winner of the Alberta Ingenuity Fund Research Excellence Summit Award.
With half his career in industry, Dr. Grover wasn’t convinced earlier on that he would shift over to the academic end of things. “With time in the academic world, I gained more and more appreciation of the value and wisdom of academic research. In my field, industry is rather short-term focused and subject to ups and downs, whereas in the university, we can pursue our own long-term, and possibly higher-risk, but high-impact research ideas.”
Dr. Grover’s research mainly focuses on fibre-optic network systems — how to design them, optimize them and keep them operational. His specialty is creating and maintaining survivability in mesh-based network systems. Network failures used to be just a nuisance. Now, an outage means much more.
A Vulnerable Necessity
“Just about everything you can think of is connected to the Internet. All of the excellent recent HD Olympics TV coverage went over fibre optic networks. Nowadays an outage of the fibre-optic backbone network can have a catastrophic, even life-threatening impact on society or nations,” Dr. Grover points out.
“This fabric of interconnected fibre optic strands of glass is a critical but vulnerable infrastructure, now akin to power, water and transportation infrastructure in importance. A huge effort goes into making sure it almost never fails.”
Most of us remember India, Iran and southeast Asia being offline recently. This, says Dr. Grover, was due to optical network system failures. In 2004, Jamaica was disconnected from the entire world for a week because of hurricane damage to fibre-optic cables.
Simply duplicating entire networks is just too cumbersome and expensive an approach. In fact, Dr. Grover says it’s not necessary nor even technically the most reliable approach. What’s better are systems that adapt and reconfigure themselves spontaneously and intelligently.
Plans are in place in an attempt to prevent certain failures. But some are just too unpredictable to stop.
“The industry takes many measures to physically protect systems, but Mother Nature is endlessly creative in finding new ways to cause failures. Who would have guessed fibre-optic cables would be bitten by sharks in the North Atlantic? There’s just no preparing in advance for something like that.”
Idea Unifies Thinking
A new scheme Dr. Grover has dubbed p-Cycles continues to change the direction of other researchers and industry planners in telecommunications. These p-Cycles are a breakthrough in the theory and technology for survivable networks because they yield the best features of prior mesh and ring techniques.
For over a decade a strong argument has gone on about which was better, ring- or mesh-based networks. The discovery of p-Cycle-based networks revolutionized the overall understanding of survivable optical networks — and unified the two camps.
Dr. Grover and his master’s degree and PhD students are also working on self-healing systems that can prioritize the most important problems.
“We’re trying to get to the point where one network can inherently support differentiated levels of survivability in the face of even multiple failures. Not only will the system recoil from the failure and self-heal, it will also recognize and prioritize the most important signals to protect against any outage.”
Crucial network applications for defence, government, police, air traffic control, banking and other high priority services would be the most likely to maintain online capabilities. The system would be able to tell which of these affected services would need the emergency care first, and in what order within their networks, even though it all happens in the blink of an eye.
Dr. Grover says that while his preparation in the field might have been over 20 years in the making, in the end it was the right amount of time for him to realize the solutions he’s found to several important problems. Most of all, the time gave him the “readiness of mind” to recognize and understand the significance of p-Cycles when they were discovered.
“I realize how easy it might have been to miss or dismiss the significance of what we were looking at in our mathematical and simulation studies of pre-cross-connected protection.
“I still remember the day my master’s student Demetrios Stamatelakis brought more experimental data. It looked wrong. It looked impossible. But it wasn’t. Today it is the technique known as p-Cycles.
“It seemed as though it should be impossible. But we couldn’t find any mistake, so we published. That was in 1998 and now everyone in the field worldwide agrees with us and is also studying the implications even further.”
The Alberta Ingenuity Fund Research Excellence Award recognizes professionals in academia or industry who have conducted innovative research in engineering, geology or geophysics — research that has been successfully applied to improve our economic and social well-being.