With a budget of 3.15 million euros and under Spanish coordination by CEDETEL, the project proposes an approach of heterogeneous reconfigurable optical networks, which optimize internet performance.

The CHRON project, funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme, has significant Spanish participation through the Center for the Development of Telecommunications of Castile and León (CEDETEL), the project coordinator, and the University of Valladolid (through the Optical Communications Group of the Higher Technical School of Telecommunications Engineering). CHRON was launched on July 1st to address the needs arising from the so-called “Internet of the Future.”.

Currently, one billion people use the internet, and it is projected that in just a few years there will be four billion users connected through various devices, anytime, anywhere. The concept of the internet of the future stems from the fact that the current internet will not be able to meet future needs through simple incremental growth; rather, the very concept of the internet must evolve.

But this concept refers not only to the network itself, but also to new personalized services, ambient intelligence, the connection between the real and virtual worlds, the massive exchange of information under secure and private conditions, and so on. However, the network itself constitutes an enabling element of the Internet of the Future, but a new kind of network: an intelligent, ubiquitous, high-capacity, and user-centric network.

Network operators need to support an increasingly diverse range of services with varying quality of service requirements. One of the key challenges is how to efficiently control and manage network resources while meeting user demands and quality of service requirements.

A New Approach to Optical Networks:
The CHRON project proposes a new approach to heterogeneous, reconfigurable optical networks capable of observing, acting, learning, and optimizing their performance. This new approach is based on cognitive networks, which are a type of network that perceives network conditions and can adapt to them at any given time, learning from these adaptations to make future self-configuration decisions. These networks can respond to the needs of a particular user while optimizing overall network resources.
The project aims to strengthen the position of European industry in the field of the Future Internet, as well as European leadership in optical networks and cognitive network management technologies. The CHRON project will contribute to increasing the economic efficiency of networks (in terms of cost per bit), interoperability through standardization, expanding the market with new types of applications that exploit the advantages of these networks, and accelerating the adoption of next-generation service infrastructure networks.

CHRON will run for 36 months with a budget of €3.15 million within the 7th Framework Programme under the theme FP7-ICT-2009-5 1.1 The Network of the Future. The consortium comprises CEDETEL, which promotes R&D, the University of Valladolid, the Technical University of Denmark, the Düsseldorf Technology Centre, the Polish telecommunications company TP SA, the Information Technology Research and Education Laboratory, and the Center for Research and Experimentation in Telecommunications for NETworked Communities (CREATE-NET).

Source: CEDETEL