This paper presents an ATE component-styled, test firmware architecture for a novel, flexible, multi-sensor for physiological monitoring. The device is fragile and the hardware components and connections must be verified for functionality before end application firmware evaluation. Additionally, the existing sensor firmware is updated to include a manufacturing test mode for additional system testing.

This paper considers grooming of low speed traffic into high speed lightpaths in a WDM based optical ring with a primary goal of reducing the cost of the entire system, which is dominated by the cost of the SONET transmission equipment connected to the optical ring. The paper attempts to enumerate the architectural options provided by SONET to arrive at a cost-effective solution, including unidirectional path-switched rings (UPSR) and bidirectional line-switched rings (BLSR), use of back-to-back connections between SONET ADMs to reduce the overall cost, and use of different ring speeds (OC-48 and OC-12). To demonstrate each of the architectures, a uniform traffic is considered and its grooming and resulting SONET architecture demonstrated. The paper deviates from earlier approaches which break the problem into two steps: traffic grooming and assignment of lightpaths to rings, in that it looks at the problem as a whole and tries to solve it in a single step. The paper also considers the characteristics of SONET UPSR and BLSR rings and how these affect the grooming. The paper derives lower and upper bounds to these problems for uniform traffic and shows how these improve on known results.

Discusses wavelength assignment for lightpaths. We study WDM networks in the form of rings and higher level networks as SONET/SDH self-healing rings. This view changes the goal of wavelength assignment (WLA) vs. previous work on the subject in a number of aspects. First, a pair of SONET add/drop multiplexers (ADMs) terminates each lightpath. These ADMs also terminate adjacent lightpaths to form rings, implying that the WLA has to support this type of sharing. Second, following Gerstal et al. (1998), we argue that the first-order optimization goal should be to minimize the overall network cost which is dominated by the number of required ADMs and not the number of wavelengths. These two minimization problems are intrinsically different, and there exist cases where the two minima cannot be simultaneously achieved. We derive a simple lower bound to the number of ADMs and show that this lower bound is not always achievable. Adding wavelength converters to the system does not improve the cost but splitting a lightpath and handling each part separately may reduce the total number of ADMs. We develop two heuristics to minimize the number of ADMs: cut-first, and assign-first. Both heuristics attempt to use the smallest number of ADMs possible. Cut-first always uses the minimum number of wavelengths, but may use more ADMs than necessary. However, the number of extra ADMs is proven to be bounded by the number of supported wavelengths and typically much less. We show instances where cut-first performs better than assign-first and vice versa. Finally, we present a set of transformations that take any WLA and improve its cost.