Raytheon BBN Technologies

Today’s core optical networks are over-provisioned, static, and insensitive to dynamic traffic. In contrast, our Petabit Highly Agile Robust Optical System (Pharos) is an on-demand, adaptable, high-utilization network that is scalable to high capacity at a reasonable cost and enables ultra-fast service set-up/tear-down and very fast and efficient recovery from multiple network failures. Developed under funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency CORONET program, this robust optical network will revolutionize the operation, performance, survivability, and security of the United States' global IP-based inter-networking infrastructure.

Raytheon BBN has developed the necessary architecture, protocols and algorithms and has forged innovations in IP/optical cross-layer traffic processing and capacity management, fast signaling to enable rapid recovery from multiple failures, and a novel open-network-operations stack that will lead to simplified network operation.

PHAROS technology:

• Facilitates rapid configuration of network resources to better react to the dynamically changing global military and commercial communications needs, as well as to events such as localized surges in capacity requirements that result from natural disasters.
• The significant increase in network capacity supports bandwidth-intensive, network-centric collaborative and distributed computing applications and accommodates the continued growth of video services.
• Supports the same level of service capacity and quality as today's static network while reducing equipment costs by 35 percent.
• Allows service providers to provide guaranteed protection of network services without the need to reserve double the capacity.
• Allows network operators to reduce capacity reserves by 25 to 30 percent compared to static dedicated protection schemes.
• Enables efficient, automated service provisioning in the face of the unpredictable traffic that is expected from cloud-services applications.