Full program

This year we are celebrating the 25th edition of ONDM. To mark the anniversary, the conference will open with a Jubilee Panel featuring participants that chaired past ONDM editions and played key roles in developing and growing the conference.

The panel will serve as a platform to briefly look back at the past editions of ONDM and focus on what the future holds for optical communications.

The keynote summarizes the state of art of optical network and outlook demands of future optical usage and demands, and calls for enabling technologies and solutions. Optical communication has penetrated into many areas. Fibres are deployed in data centers, long-haul backbones, metro networks and FTTH access networks. With the continuous development of service requirements, optical network capabilities and requirements are evolving accordingly.

• Continuous bandwidth increasing. For example, access network bandwidth increases from 2.5 Gb/s to 10 Gb/s, transport network increases from 100 Gb/s to 200 Gb/s and 400 Gb/s per wavelength, and data center network increases from 400 Gb/s to 800 Gb/s per wavelength.
• The application scope of optical fibre networks is expanded, such as fibre to the room, fibre to the desktop, and fibre to the machine.
• From segmented optical networks to end-to-end converged networks
• Thanks to AI technologies, optical networks provide low-latency, high-reliability, and guaranteed experience services in an autonomous way. Then a natural question to be asked is: What is the next-generation optical technology? The presentation will discuss what will look like the future optical network, including:
• Higher bandwidth: 50Gb/s or even higher in access, 800Gb/s to 1.6Tb/s in long-haul and 1.6Tb/s within data center.
• Guaranteed lower latency and jitter down to 1/10 of current generation and 10 times higher reliability, 10 times higher power efficiency
• Go from fibre-to-everything to wireless optical-to-everything,for example FSO and LiFi, which breaks the limitation of optical fibre, from connecting homes to connecting more things.
• Support autonomous driven network supported by artificial intelligence.
• Extend from optical communication to a plethora of new applications incl. optical sensing networks; So how to draw the blue print of next generation and how to make it happen? This is question for all stakeholders in the optical ecosystem. They must work together to explore the next-generation optical applications and key

TeraFlow will be a new type of secure cloud-native SDN controller that will radically advance the state-of-the-art in beyond 5G networks. This new SDN controller shall be able to integrate with the current NFV and MEC frameworks as well as to provide revolutionary features for both flow management (service layer) and optical/microwave network equipment integration (infrastructure layer) while incorporating security using Machine Learning (ML) and forensic evidence for multi-tenancy based on Distributed Ledgers.

The target pool of stakeholders expands beyond the traditional telecom operators towards the edge and hyperscale cloud providers. These actors will be benefited from TeraFlow by a) exploiting a new type of secure SDN controller based on cloud-native solutions while, and b) achieving substantial business agility with novel and highly dynamic network services with zero-touch automation features.

This workshop intends to create awareness of multiple aspects of TeraFlow SDN controller. In this sense, discussion with related stakeholders will provide interesting feedback in order to update TeraFlow requirements.

The EU commission recently granted the 2.5 y Hexa-X project (H2020 ICT-52) to be the European Flagship project on explorative research towards 6G. With 25 partners from leading academic institutions and industry players, the project aims to lay the foundation for 6G, an area that will be of key importance in the technical evolution in the coming decade. The project will establish a vision for the future networks of 2030 addressing the envisioned use cases and services. The 6G networks will be designed based on the fundamental principles of trustworthiness, sustainability and digital inclusion. The project will explore a plethora of technical enablers related to e.g. enhanced radio performance and combined communication and localization/sensing; Connected intelligence with integrated AI/ML; Network evolution expansion, exploring new network architectures and novel verticals.

As the Hexa-X project will be the European 6G flagship project, interactions with other projects and initiatives will be crucial and the workshop presents an important venue for initiating collaboration and sharing of results. The project is not directly conducting research on optical networks but foresees that the technology will be an integral part in providing high performance and low latency backhaul and fronthaul to the core and access network and the workshop has invited leading experts in the field of optical networks to present the academic and industrial view point.

The workshop will also provide an overview of the Hexa-X vision for 6G for 2030, including use cases and key performance and value indicators. In addition, the workshop will host a panel discussing the aspects brought by the Hexa-X project and the invited speakers.

Network evolution has lately been led by new mobile technologies (5G/6G), edge-centric computation, and artificial intelligence. The protection of critical data as well as guaranteeing various stringent service requirements such as very high throughput, ultra-low latency, high availability, and security, are some of the challenges faced by network operators, which are also addressed in this workshop.

The workshop is proposed by the CELTIC-Next flagship project AI-NET PROTECT (Providing Resilient & secure networks [Operating on Trusted Equipment] to CriTical infrastructures), which aims at providing automated resilience and security for networks operated on trusted equipment, critical infrastructures, and enterprises. During the workshop, different case studies on network automation and machine learning performed in the frame of the project will be discussed.

The workshop will consist of 7 short presentations given by the representatives from Network operators, system providers, and academia, and will finish with a panel discussion.

The workshop aims to show photographs of some aspects of the next generation (5G) networks under various aspects, not necessarily technical ones. In fact, presentations regarding new transmission, control or traffic technologies will also focus on economic aspects and 5G is also seen in the perspective of an exceptional investment opportunity.

Apart from the moderator, the participants in the Panel will all be women, giving the workshop not only a very high technical level, but also a sensitivity that male researchers often do not have. The successful researchers who will participate in the panel can serve as an example to girls who want to pursue this career.

The title of this keynote is inspired by Jeff Bezos’ latest book Invent & Wander. In it, among others, readers learn why it’s all about the long term, how a willingness to fail is closely connected to innovation, and what the Covid-19 pandemic has taught us. Each insight offers new ways of thinking through today’s challenges – and more importantly, tomorrow’s – and the never-ending urgency of striving ahead, never resting on one’s laurels. The essence of this day 1 mindset may be best captured by the wonderful word “wanderlust,” the irresistible urge or desire to wander far away and discover the world at the end of your comfort zone. The keynote presents recent work paving the way for the future Internet of No Things. While 5G was supposed to be about the Internet of Everything, to be transformative 6G might be just about the opposite of Everything, that is, Nothing or, more technically, No Things. In addition to the recently emerging invisible-to-visible (I2V) technology concept, the keynote explores the convergence of AI-enhanced multi-access edge computing (MEC), intelligent mobile robots, and blockchain technologies to help realize the Internet of No Things as a useful stepping-stone toward realizing the far-reaching vision of future 6G networks, ushering in the 6G post-smartphone era and the delivery of advanced extended reality (XR) experiences, e.g., sixth-sense perceptions.

The communication networks on which we rely for so many aspects of our daily lives are constantly under attack. This is increasingly the case as we have adapted to remote working, schooling, health service provision, etc. The emergence of technologies such as Software-Defined Networking (SDN), Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), and Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) enable innovation in network security, but these technologies create additional attack surfaces. Dramatic advances in Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques are influencing security services and design for security, but they can also be exploited to produce sophisticated attacks. In this keynote, we will discuss the latest research on security in the networks of the future. We specifically consider adversaries in the network; how do we deal with adversarial attacks targeting ML-based network systems or programmable data planes? What do protections against adversarial attacks look like? Assuming that we can never guarantee security, can we optimize the security profile of the network?

This workshop aims at identifying issues pertinent to the representation of women in scientific and engineering careers, dissecting challenges in nurturing female talent, and identifying strategies for retaining it. The event will take place in the form of a panel, bringing together leaders from academia and industry, and engaging them in a dynamic discussion with the audience. The status of women in the field of optical networking and photonics will be discussed as a sample of the situation in a concrete engineering area.

Some of the questions we will try to answer include:

• What are the main causes of female talent drain from industry and research centers?
• Are existing equality-oriented policies enough?
• How to transform the widely adopted image of a scientist as a male?
• How to strengthen female mentorship?
• What is the current status of women in research on optical networking and photonics?