A Self-organizing Control Plane for Failure Management in Transparent Optical Networks

Self-organizing systems are present in many areas of nature and science, and have more recently been increasingly applied to telecommunications. These systems often exhibit common structural properties, such as the small-world property, and can react to changes in their environment with no centralized control. With ever-increasing capacity requirements, Transparent Optical Networks (TONs) have been established as the enabling technology for future long-haul high-speed backbone networks. Designing fast security mechanisms is critical, particularly due to the high speeds and transparency inherent in TONs. In this paper, we propose a self-organizing small-world control plane for failure management in TONs, which can improve scalability and adapt to changes in the network.