Abhinava Sadasivarao

Public and Private Enterprise clouds are changing the nature of WAN data center interconnects. Data center WAN interconnects today are pre-allocated, static optical trunks of high capacity. These optical pipes carry aggregated packet traffic originating from within the data centers while routing decisions are made by devices at the data center edges. In this paper, we propose a software-defined networking enabled optical transport architecture (Transport SDN) that meshes seamlessly with the deployment of SDN within the Data Centers. The proposed programmable architecture abstracts a core transport node into a programmable virtual switch that leverages the OpenFlow protocol for control. A demonstration use-case of an OpenFlow-enabled optical virtual switch managing a small optical transport network for a big-data application is described. With appropriate extensions to OpenFlow, we discuss how the programmability and flexibility SDN brings to packet-optical data center interconnect will be substantial in solving some of the complex multi-vendor, multi-layer, multi-domain issues that hybrid cloud providers face.

There have been a lot of proposals to unify the control and management of packet and circuit networks but none have been deployed widely. In this paper, we propose a simple programmable architecture that abstracts a core transport node into a programmable virtual switch, that meshes well with the software-defined network paradigm while leveraging the OpenFlow protocol for control. A demonstration use-case of an OpenFlow-enabled optical virtual switch implementation managing a small optical transport network for big-data applications is described. With appropriate extensions to OpenFlow, we discuss how the programmability and flexibility SDN brings to packet-optical backbone networks will be substantial in solving some of the complex multi-vendor, multi-layer, multi-domain issues service providers face today.

We demonstrate streaming telemetry capabilities for optical networks implemented as modular software service. The telemetry system is capable of user-defined configurable streaming to an external collector at very high frequencies of all critical optical performance metrics.

Wide area networks (WAN) forward traffic through a mix of packet and optical data planes, composed by a variety of devices from different vendors. Multiple forwarding technologies and encapsulation methods are used for each data plane (e.g. IP, MPLS, ATM, SONET, Wavelength Switching). Despite standards defined, the control planes of these devices are usually not interoperable, and different technologies are used to manage each forwarding segment independently (e.g. Open Flow, TL-1, GMPLS). The result is lack of coordination between layers and inefficient resource usage. In this paper we discuss the design and implementation of a system that uses unmodified Open Flow to optimize network utilization across layers, enabling practical bandwidth virtualization. We discuss strategies for scalable traffic monitoring and to minimize losses on route updates across layers. A prototype of the system was built using a traditional circuit reservation application and an unmodified SDN controller, and its evaluation was performed on a multi-vendor test bed.

A novel and practical threshold-based extension of streaming telemetry that advances open WDM analytics and introduces network verification, is demonstrated employing an extensible NOS application agent combined with standard NETCONF/YANG and open-source software technologies.