Research
Two questions, twenty years of answers
How do you get more out of a fiber network without losing what you added? And how do you keep a power grid's communication layer observable and recoverable when it is attacked? Everything below is a thread of work on one of those questions, from the lab's own record.
Current directions
Multi-band, space-division optical networks
Planning and controlling networks that use several spectral bands and several fiber cores or fibers at once, with quality of transmission built into every decision. Three JOCN articles in 2026 and the FUSION platform.
Grid cyber resilience
Detecting attacks in real time, restoring measurement and communication after disasters, and learning across sites without sharing raw data. The base of the SUMMIT testbed, starting October 2026.
AI in the network loop
Reinforcement learning and multi-agent methods for resource allocation and restoration, and the trust and verification such agents need before they are allowed to act on infrastructure.
Research figures
The threads, 2002 to 2026
Advance reservation and scheduling
31 publications, 2010 to 2018
Scheduling bandwidth ahead of time for science and data-center traffic: sliding and flexible windows, lightpath switching, and multi-domain circuits, including work on ESnet's OSCARS.
Wireless sensor and access networks
26 publications, 2006 to 2017
Reliability, coverage, and energy in wireless sensor networks, including work with the reliability engineering group.
OBS contention and QoS
23 publications, 2002 to 2007
The lab's origins: optical burst switching, contention resolution, burst segmentation, and quality of service in bufferless optical networks.
Manycast and anycast
23 publications, 2007 to 2018
Delivering to any k of m candidate destinations, and protecting those services against failures, for distributed computing and content.
Elastic and SDM optical networks
19 publications, 2014 to 2026
How fiber networks add capacity without losing it: multi-band spectrum, multi-core and multi-fiber space-division multiplexing, and quality-of-transmission-aware allocation that decides route, band, core, channel, and modulation together. The current center of the lab's optical work.
- QoT-Aware Dynamic Resource Allocation and Grooming in Multi-Band Space-Division Multiplexing Networks 2026, journal
- QoT-Aware Spectral and Spatial Scaling Trade-offs in Multi-Band Space Division Multiplexing over EONs [Invited] 2026, journal
- Channel-Based ICXT- and NLI-Aware Service Provisioning for Multi-Band Over SDM Systems 2025, conference
Smart grid resilience and security
19 publications, 2020 to 2026
Restoring observability and communication after attacks and disasters, detecting intrusions and false data in real time, federated learning across grid sites, and co-simulating the grid with its network. The lab's fastest-growing thread and the base of the SUMMIT testbed.
- Cyber Security Constrained Economic Dispatch for Resilient Power System Operation 2025, conference
- Disaster-Resilient Cyber-Physical Distribution System Reconfiguration and Dynamic Networked Microgrid Formation under Intermittent Generation 2025, journal
- Exploring a Smart FDI Attack and Enhancing Anomaly Detection in Smart Meters 2025, conference
Energy and carbon-aware networking
16 publications, 2011 to 2018
Routing and grooming that follow renewable energy and electricity price across the network.
Survivability and protection
14 publications, 2004 to 2025
Keeping service up through failures: protection and restoration for unicast, multicast, and anycast connections, and for the grid's communication layer.
TCP over OBS
14 publications, 2005 to 2012
How transport protocols behave over burst-switched optical networks, and how to keep throughput up when bursts are dropped.
Reliability modeling
3 publications, 2017 to 2018
Reliability analysis of cloud storage and other multi-state systems.
OBS architecture
2 publications, 2005 to 2007
Signaling and architecture for optical burst and packet switched networks.
Online social network privacy
2 publications, 2014 to 2015
Data center and cloud networking
2 publications, 2016 to 2026
Edge computing and IoT
2 publications, 2016 to 2018
Edge and IoT systems, including the DeepFood work on image-based dietary assessment.
Machine learning for networks
2 publications, 2024 to 2025
Tools and reproducibility
2 publications, 2024 to 2026
Physical layer modeling
2 publications, 2025 to 2026
Models of noise, nonlinear interference, inter-core crosstalk, and pulse shaping that let planning and control tools reason about what a link can actually carry.
Grid and e-science networking
1 publications, 2005 to 2005
Optical packet switching
1 publications, 2010 to 2010
Threads and summaries come from the research record, where each publication is recorded as a problem, an approach, and a finding.