Coordinating Associate Editor:

Wayne D. Grover, TRLabs, University of Alberta

Guest Editors:

Lena Wosinska, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) / ICT Sweden
Andrea Fumagalli, The University of Texas at Dallas

The Journal of Optical Networking (JON) is soliciting papers for a feature Issue pertaining to all aspects of reliable components and systems for optical networks and concepts, techniques, and experience leading to high availability of services provided by optical networks. Most nations now recognize that telecommunications in all its forms -- including voice, Internet, video, and so on -- are "critical infrastructure" for the society, commerce, government, and education. Yet all these services and applications are almost completely dependent on optical networks for their realization. "Always on" or apparently unbreakable communications connectivity is the expectation from most users and for some services is the actual requirement as well. Achieving the desired level of availability of services, and doing so with some elegance and efficiency, is a meritorious goal for current researchers. This requires development and use of high-reliability components and subsystems, but also concepts for active reconfiguration and capacity planning leading to high availability of service through unseen fast-acting survivability mechanisms. The feature issue is also intended to reflect some of the most important current directions and objectives in optical networking research, which include the aspects of integrated design and operation of multilevel survivability and realization of multiple Quality-of-Protection service classes. Dynamic survivable service provisioning, or batch re-provisioning is an important current theme, as well as methods that achieve high availability at far less investment in spare capacity than required by brute force service path duplication or 100% redundant rings, which is still the surprisingly prevalent practice. Papers of several types are envisioned in the feature issue, including outlook and forecasting types of treatments, optimization and analysis, new concepts for survivability, or papers on availability analysis methods or results. Customer, vendor, and researcher viewpoints and priorities will all be given consideration. Especially valuable to the community would be papers that include or provide measured data on actual reliability and availability performance of optical networking components or systems.

Scope of Submission

The scope of the papers includes, but is not limited to, the following topics:

• Reliability and availability measurement techniques specific to optical network devices or services.
• Data on SRLG statistics and frequency of different actual failure causes.
• Real-life accounts or data on failure and repair rates or projected values for use in availability analysis.
• Availability analysis methods, especially for survivable networks with reconfigurable or adaptive failure-specific responses.
• Availability analysis and comparisons of basic schemes for survivability.
• Differentiated availability schemes.
• Design for Multiple Quality of Protection.
• Different schemes for on-demand survivable service provisioning.
• Basic comparisons or proposals of new survivability mechanisms and architectures.
• Concepts yielding higher than 1+1 protection switching availability at less than 100% redundancy.
• Survivable service provisioning in domains of optical transparency: dealing with signal impairments.

Manuscript Submission

To submit to this special issue, follow the normal procedure for submission to JON, indicating "Feature Issue: Optical Network Availability" in the "Comments" field of the online submission form. For all other questions relating to this feature issue, please send an e-mail to jon@osa.org, subject line "Feature Issue: Optical Network Availability."

Additional information can be found on the JON website:
http://www.osa-jon.org/submission/.

Submission Deadline: 1 January 2006