An extended software defined optical networks slicing architecture

Abstract

Optical Networks are composed of multiple devices, from multiple vendors. Normally these networks have a huge transmission capacity. The Slicing of Optical Networks is not a new concept, but continues to be very important, since the capacity of Optical Networks keeps evolving. Most of the time the slicing is manually configured by system operators. Besides being laborious and error-prone, such configuration limits the clients’ ability to customize and configure the network according to their own needs. One way out of this problem is to separate from these devices the control of and the data from the planes. The Software Defined Networks (SDNs) propose the separation of planes while also offering network operators the flexibility to create and manage applications, enabling them to reduce the network costs by globally optimizing the network’s resources, reducing the staff needed to configure it, and contributing for less violation of the service level agreement (SLA). SDN can also help operators to maximize their profit by generating more revenue through mechanisms that increase availability and failure resiliency, maximize throughput, allow for fast dynamic reprovisioning and enable network virtualization. The goal of this paper is to propose a Software Defined Optical Networks Slicing Architecture (SONA) extension (eSONA). that permits defining components such as topology manager, inventory manager, slice manager and path provisioner, and thus enable Optical Networks slicing. It has proved to be capable of managing different slices and provisioning a path on a given slice over the same physical optical network. It has showed an excellent performance, taking little time to provision paths, even with a large number of nodes, which are crucial for optical environments.