SONA: Software Defined Optical Networks Slicing Architecture

Abstract

Optical Transport Networks (OTNs) are composedof multiple devices. The configuration of these devices is man-ually done by system operators. Besides laborious and error-prone, this configuration also limits the client customizationand configuration of the network. One way out of this lack ofcustomization is the separation of control and data planes fromthese devices. The Software Defined Networks (SDNs) proposethe separation of planes with the flexibility to create and manageapplications by network operators, enabling this operators toreduce network cost by globally optimizing the network resources, reducing the staff needed to configure the network and enablingless service level agreement (SLA) violation. SDN can also helpoperators to maximize their profit by generating more revenuethrough mechanisms to increase availability, increase failureresiliency, maximizing throughput, fast dynamic reprovisioningand enabling network virtualization. The objective of this paperis to propose a Software Defined Optical Networks SlicingArchitecture (SONA) that allows defining components such astopology manager, inventory manager, slice manager and pathprovisioner, enabling Optical Networks partitioning. It proved tobe capable of managing an optical network, by managing networknodes inventory, managing different slices over the same physicalnetwork, provisioning a path on a given slice over the physicalnetwork. It had an excellent performance taking little time toprovision paths, even with a large number of nodes, crucial foroptical environments.