VIOLA: The German optical testbed for advanced network services

The German optical testbed VIOLA has been started in summer 2004 in the region of North-Rhine-Westphalia with an extension to Bavaria. It is an integrated testbed for applications and advanced network services, organised as a consortium with partners from industry, research laboratories, universities and the DFN association. Major goals are the test of different signalling mechanisms in a heterogeneous environment of routers and switches and the development of a userdriven dynamical bandwidth allocation