2024 France Tech Arena

 

During this Round 1, registered teams will be asked to work on, and submit their solution on the platform. 

Your team may select to participate in one problem or in both (Optical Networks and Datacom) problems.

A sneak peak into the Optical Networks Problem: Optimizing Services Continuity in Optical Networks

In today's digital era, the stability and resilience of networks have become a critical challenge for businesses and service providers. Networks are required not only to handle the increasing flow of data but also to ensure the continuity of key operations and high availability of services in the face of natural disasters, hardware failures, or multiple link failures due to maintenance activities. Against this backdrop, designing algorithms that can adapt to changes in the network and optimize services continuity is crucial for enhancing network robustness and reducing the risk of potential services interruptions.

This challenge aims to encourage participants to design an efficient algorithm that intelligently plans and adjusts the  flow of services in the network to respond to potential multiple fiber cuts or node failures. The algorithm must exhibit a high degree of flexibility and adaptability, while also considering the complexities of real network environments, such as link capacity limitations, the service level agreement (SLA) requirements of the business, and the ability to maintain services continuity under various network topology changes. At the same time, it should optimize the use of network resources, improving the overall efficiency and reliability of the network.

 SELECTION CRITERIA
For Optical Networks Problem:
Ability to follow the rules of the input/output format and interact with the judge system.
Ability to create an optical network replanning algorithm to Maximize the value of available services after the fiber faults in each test scenario.
The ranking rule is that the higher the score, the higher the ranking. If the scores are the same, then it is ranked according to the submission time.
In addition to maximizing the value of available services, participants also need to identify some bottleneck scenarios and prepare to recognize the shortcomings of existing algorithms.
Participants also need to reasonably plan the OTU resources at each site.

 

A sneak peak into the Data Communications Problem: Soft slice scheduling latency isolation

With the emergence of diversified new services in the 5G and cloud era, different industries, services, and users have various QoS requirements on networks. Network slicing can meet differentiated requirements of different customers on network capabilities. Deterministic latency guarantee is an important feature of network slicing. Soft slicing uses scheduling algorithms to schedule packets of different slices, thereby implementing latency isolation between slices.

An objective of the task is to design a soft slice scheduling algorithm. By properly arranging the scheduling sequence between slices, as many slices as possible meet the bandwidth and delay constraints, and at the same time, the maximum delay waiting for all slice packet scheduling is minimized.

  SELECTION CRITERIA

For Data Communications Problem:
Ability to create a datacenter capacity planning model to optimize a cost function and account for constraints.
Ability to model and account for business risks.
Ability to adapt your solution to changes in the cloud computing demand.
Ability to forecast the cloud computing demand and implement price-optimization strategy.
The Teams that present a solution that responds best to the Challenge brief, in the required format and within the stated timelines, will be selected by the panel of experts nominated by the Sponsor.
The maximum number of Participants selected during Round 1 is 24.

 

The detailed description of the challenge will be released on October 7, 2024 for Optical Networks Problem and October 14, 2024 for Data Communications Problem. You will be also invited to attend an special online webinar/opening ceremony, where you may ask all the technical questions about the problems and submission process that you may have. We will also have a dedicated communications channel for all your questions during the competition.

 

Your live score will appear on a leaderboard among the scores of all participating teams. 

You will have the opportunity to climb higher on the leaderboard until Oct.21 for Optical Networks and October 28 for Data Communications to be selected among the selected teams for ON-SITE Hackathon in Paris!