The current optical infrastructure has abundant bandwidth, but limited services. A new service infrastructure is needed. Current optical networking is limited in computation and applications. We are looking at some services and architectural issues, such as: ways to build a light path among service providers; methods of building a service composition of the light-path between technologies, i.e., Access, Metro, and Long Haul; ways to share the expensive infrastructure among service providers; and finding the right available optical resource among providers. It is hard to add computation to the core of the optical infrastructure. We seek to determine types of intelligence the can be added to the edge of the optical core. We also are investigating how to build a service directory of storage, backup, computation, optical VPN, and available Lambdas.
Examples of services for research are: setting the right optical link for grid computing and finding the best instance of storage area network (SAN) and determining what is best; disaster recovery over Metro, including storage and computation; providing optical VPN on demand to a remote site needing 10 Gb/s for 25 minutes; providing a link with HDTV quality (for a remote medical operation lastin two hours); and providing periodic network backup capabilities (preferred to a backup bunker) without the need for local tapes. Finally, it is important to let the applications negotiate the resources' availability and control the network path creation.