Unified Multi-Layer among Software Defined Multi-Domain Optical Networks (Invited)

The software defined networking (SDN) enabled by OpenFlow protocol has gained popularity which can enable the network to be programmable and accommodate both fixed and flexible bandwidth services. In this paper, we present a unified multi-layer (UML) architecture with multiple controllers and a dynamic orchestra plane (DOP) for software defined multi-domain optical networks. The proposed architecture can shield the differences among various optical devices from multi-vendors and the details of connecting heterogeneous networks. The cross-domain services with on-demand bandwidth can be deployed via unified interfaces provided by the dynamic orchestra plane. Additionally, the globalization strategy and practical capture of signal processing are presented based on the architecture. The overall feasibility and efficiency of the proposed architecture is experimentally verified on the control plane of our OpenFlow-based testbed. The performance of globalization strategy under heavy traffic load scenario is also quantitatively evaluated based on UML architecture compared with other strategies in terms of blocking probability, average hops, and average resource consumption. OPEN ACCESS Electronics 2015, 4 330