6:00pm: Networking/light dinner
7:00pm: Presentation
8:00pm: Adjourn

Title

Critical Photonics Challenges of Future Optical Networking

Speaker

Dr. Loukas Paraschis, Cisco Systems, 2009 IEEE Photonics Society Distinguished Lecturer

Abstract

This presentation reviews the evolution and the advancements of converged WDM network architectures and the enabling photonics technology. The scalable, cost-effective network evolution is very important for supporting the strong bandwidth growth of broadband and business applications, currently at more than 50% CAGR, and expected by 2012 to exceed globally 40 Exabytes per month. This network requirements have increasingly motivated a fundamental shift towards DWDM, and packets (datagrams), leading the most significant evolution of transport networks in recent history. This emerging converged open intelligent DWDM layer improves significantly the network capital and operational cost. The talk will review the interplay among the network architectures, the transmission system intelligence, and the advanced enabling photonics technologies. The innovations in system design, and the most important performance characteristics of the current and emerging photonics technologies will be also discussed in detail; including notably reconfigurable wavelength optical-add-drop and switching, advancements in transmission of 40 and 100 Gb/s channels leveraging new modulation formats, optical amplification, dispersion compensation, and electronic processing, which have collectively enabled high performance fiber transmission digital systems that cost-effectively scale to Tb/s and thousands of km. Future network evolution and important related research topics are also being considered.

Biography

Loukas (Lucas) Paraschis is solutions business development manager at Cisco, responsible for next generation core network architectures in emerging markets. At Cisco, he has worked also on IP-over-WDM architectures, multi-service metro WDM systems, and optical transport technologies, and the associated market development efforts. Prior to his current role, Loukas worked as an R&D engineer, product manager, and technical leader in optical networking and core routing, and completed graduate studies at Stanford University (PhD applied physics 1999, MS EE 1998). He has (co)authored more than 70 peerreviewed publications, invited, and tutorial presentations, a book, a book chapter, technical reports, and three patent applications, has been associate editor for optical networks of the Journal of Communication and Networks, guest editor of the IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technology, member of the IEEE (SM'06), the OSA, and multiple conference organizing committees, and is an IEEE Photonics Society Distinguished Lecturer (2009). Loukas was born in Athens, Greece, where he completed his undergraduate studies.