Unified Control Architecture for Optical Transport Networks

This memo introduce an Software Defined Networking (SDN) based architecture to monitor and analyse physical parameters on various types of network equipments, and control the adjustable part of whole parameters. SDN is a programmable networks approach that supports the separation of control and forwarding plane via standardized interfaces, and make equipments foolish while centralizing control function on a logical entity named Controller. The controller can achieve rapid and accurate fault location, dynamic parameter adjustment, device aging forecast, and cross-layer optimization via this memo.

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in .

In order to support various cloud services which are remote and geographically distributed, we need a high-capacity, high-reliability and high-flexibility network. Optical network, as a strong candidate, could provide energy-efficiency, dynamic control, and recent technology advancements including software defined network (SDN) support. Software defined optical network (SDON), which allows carriers to control the optical network using software running on a network operating system, leads to a more flexible control manner. On the other hand, in today’s commercial optical transport networks (OTN), different domains, especially equipment of different vendors, are separately operated without dynamic interaction, which leads to low network efficiency, high OPEX and CAPAX. In light of this, some latest activities have tried to apply SDON/Openflow to multi-domain optical networks. This results in a lack of universality for promoting a unified control manner for multi-vendor multi-domain OTN.

The unified control orchestrator (UCO) architecture for multi-vendor multi-domain OTN is illustrated. The architecture aims to achieve the port discovery, resources collection, routing path computing, OTN connection creation, and connection deletion. 4 layers are presented for the required functions.