OpenConfig and OpenROADM are emerging as the most relevant initiatives to support partial disaggregation, in which the optical line system is provided by a single vendor while transponders can be provided, in pairs, by different vendors. This way, vendor lock-in is eliminated at the transponder level, without significantly impacting the transmission performance. Although the above initiatives have defined YANG models reaching a good level of maturity, there are still open issues that prevent the full deployment of vendor-neutral partially disaggregated solutions. Among these, the candidate transmission modes in a transponder, including proprietary solutions, are exposed in the YANG models as opaque attributes called Operational (OP) Modes, thus limiting the awareness and the effectiveness of the SDN controller in the selection of the most appropriate transmission mode. In this work, we focus on the open issues related to the configuration and adaptation of transmission parameters. In particular, we focus on the OpenConfig concept of OP Mode enabling the abstraction of transmission complexity but currently preventing an SDN controller to manage transponders in a fully vendor-neutral way. This work first estimates, through a simulative study, the network performance benefit that is achievable by optimizing the OP mode selection. Then, a telemetry-based automated solution is proposed, designed and implemented to enhance the OP mode concept in case of both provisioning and adaptation scenarios (e.g., upon failure), also considering the impact in the tributary/client network. In particular, the following components have been designed and implemented: (i) software agent for OpenConfig transponders; (ii) software agent for OpenROADM line systems, (iii) an automatic telemetryassisted monitoring handler; and (iv) SDN control procedures implemented in the ONOS Controller. The proposed components and comprehensive solution have been evaluated in a network testbed encompassing multi-vendor network elements, successfully demonstrating a full vendor-neutral partially disaggregated provisioning and recovery operations.

In Beyond-5G Networks, detailed end-to-end monitoring of specific application traffic will be required along with the access-backhaul-cloud continuum to enable low latency service thanks to local edge steering. Current monitoring solutions are confined to specific network segments. In-band telemetry (INT) technologies for SDN programmable data planes based on the P4 language are effective in the backhaul network segment, although limited to inter-switch latency, therefore link latencies including wireless and optical segments are excluded from INT monitoring. Moreover, information such as user equipment geolocation information would allow detailed mobility monitoring and improved cloud-edge steering policies. However, the synchronization between latency and location information, typically provided by different platforms, is hard to achieve with current monitoring systems. In this paper P4-based INT is proposed to be thoroughly extended involving the user equipment (UE). The novel INT mechanism is designed to provide synchronized and accurate end-to-end latency and geolocation information, enabling decentralized steering policies, i.e. involving the UE and selected switches, without the SDN controller intervention. The proposal also includes an Artifical Intelligence (AI)-assisted forecast system able to predict latency and geolocation in advance and trigger faster edge steering.

This demo shows a 5G X-haul testbed enhanced with P4 switches implementing the offloading of the User Plane Function module. The P4 code includes GTP protocol encapsulation/decapsulation function, fully configurable N3-N6-N9 steering, and advanced online monitoring of the experienced latency metadata.

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Network slicing plays a key role in the 5G ecosystem for verticals to introduce new use cases in the industrial sector, i.e., Industry 4.0. However, a widely recognized challenge of network slicing is to provide traffic isolation and concurrently satisfy diverse performance requirements, e.g., bandwidth and latency. Such challenge becomes even more important when serving a large number of network traffic flows under a resource-limited condition between distributed sites, e.g., factory floor and remote office. In this work, we present the capability to retain these two goals at the same time, by applying the virtual queue notion over a priority queuing based pipeline in P4 switch over software-defined networks. To examine the effectiveness of our approach, a proof-of-concept is setup to serve different requests of Industry 4.0 use cases over a mixed data path, including P4 switch and Open vSwitch, for a large number of network flows.

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Effective control of pluggable transceivers in SONiC-based packet-optical nodes is demonstrated. A workflow for multi-layer recovery upon soft failure detection is validated, showing no traffic disruption and fast node-driven coordination between packet and optical operations.

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