Plenary - Main Room (Tue, 09:00)

In the old days of traditional separation of IP and DWDM, there was no need for IP folks to care about much other than what they used on their routers/switches (while the transport team ran the DWDM infra). These past DWDM infra approaches for maximizing the data capacity per fiber pair went for running more and more DWDM channels with grid spacings as small as possible. This meant that grid spacings shrank from 200GHz to 100GHz and then 50GHz with some applications even going for 25GHz.
Now i…

Improving communication privacy for the Internet is increasingly important for users. Although there are various forms of protection for communication privacy at various communication layers, Internet communication requires packets to traverse the network. Packet addressing information needs to remain visible for correct forwarding of packets, and so address bits could be used for tracking individual users in terms of network usage and location, as well as building a picture of service usage th…

This abstract explores the multifaceted evolution of Meta's network architecture—specifically the Backbone and Edge—in response to unprecedented traffic demands and the emergence of latency-sensitive AI workloads.

The presentation first details the scaling journey of the Backbone network, which has achieved over 10X growth through a strategic combination of DC Metro Architecture, platform Scaling Up (e.g., faster interfaces), and Scaling Out (e.g., multiple devices per plane). A key enabler of …