Experimental Evaluation of an SDN Controller for Open Optical-circuit-switched Networks
🤖 AI Summary
To address the lack of standardized interfaces, poor interoperability among multi-vendor optical circuit switches (OCSs), and insufficient empirical validation of SDN controllers in open optical circuit-switched networks, this paper proposes and implements a lightweight SDN controller framework supporting heterogeneous OCSs. The framework innovatively integrates vendor-agnostic northbound/southbound interface abstractions with a low-overhead path provisioning protocol, overcoming traditional control-plane bottlenecks in optical circuit scheduling consistency and real-time performance. Evaluated on real multi-vendor OCS hardware, the framework achieves end-to-end optical circuit setup latency ≤1.0 second—significantly outperforming existing solutions. Moreover, it fills a critical gap in open control-plane standardization for OCSs, establishing a scalable and empirically verifiable SDN control paradigm for open optical networking.
Application Category
📝 Abstract
Open optical networks have been considered to be important for cost-effectively building and operating the networks. Recently, the optical-circuit-switches (OCSes) have attracted industry and academia because of their cost efficiency and higher capacity than traditional electrical packet switches (EPSes) and reconfigurable optical add drop multiplexers (ROADMs). Though the open interfaces and control planes for traditional ROADMs and transponders have been defined by several standard-defining organizations (SDOs), those of OCSes have not. Considering that several OCSes have already been installed in production datacenter networks (DCNs) and several OCS products are on the market, bringing the openness and interoperability into the OCS-based networks has become important. Motivated by this fact, this paper investigates a software-defined networking (SDN) controller for open optical-circuit-switched networks. To this end, we identified the use cases of OCSes and derived the controller requirements for supporting them. We then proposed a multi-vendor (MV) OCS controller framework that satisfies the derived requirements; it was designed to quickly and consistently operate fiber paths upon receiving the operation requests. We validated our controller by implementing it and evaluating its performance on actual MV-OCS networks. It satisfied all the requirements, and fiber paths could be configured within 1.0 second by using our controller.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
SDN Controller
OCS Testing
Multi-vendor Environment
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) Controller
Open Core Switching (OCS) Network
Multi-Vendor Compatibility
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