Software defined networking (SDN) and flexible grid optical transport technology are two key technologies that allow network operators to customize their infrastructure based on application requirements and therefore minimizing the extra capital and operational costs required for hosting new applications. In this paper, for the first time we report on design, implementation & demonstration of a novel OpenFlow based SDN unified control plane allowing seamless operation across heterogeneous state-of-the-art optical and packet transport domains. We verify and experimentally evaluate OpenFlow protocol extensions for flexible DWDM grid transport technology along with its integration with fixed DWDM grid and layer-2 packet switching.

A large number of factors generate uncertainty on traffic demands and requirements. In order to deal with uncertainty optical nodes and networks are equipped with flexibility. In this context, we define several types of flexibility and propose a method, based on entropy maximization, to quantitatively evaluate the flexibility provided by optical node components, subsystems, and architectures. Using this method we demonstrate the equivalence, in terms of switching flexibility, of finer spectrum granularity, and faster reconfiguration rate. We also show that switching flexibility is closely related to bandwidth granularity. The proposed method is used to derive formulae for the switching flexibility of key optical node components and the switching and architectural flexibility of four elastic optical node configurations. The elastic optical nodes presented provide various degrees of flexibility and functionality that are discussed in the paper, from flexible spectrum switching to adaptive architectures that support elastic switching of frequency, time, and spatial resources plus on-demand spectrum defragmentation. We further complement this analysis by experimentally demonstrating flexible time, spectrum, and space switching plus dynamic architecture reconfiguration. The implemented architectures support continuous and subwavelength heterogeneous signals with bitrates ranging from 190 Mb∕s, for a subwavelength channel, to 555 Gb∕s for a multicarrier superchannel. Results show good performance and the feasibility of implementing the architecture-on-demand concept.

We present the first elastic, space division multiplexing, and multi-granular network based on two 7-core MCF links and four programmable optical nodes able to switch traffic utilising the space, frequency and time dimensions with over 6000-fold bandwidth granularity. Results show good end-to-end performance on all channels with power penalties between 0.75 dB and 3.7 dB.

We present results from the first demonstration of a fully integrated SDN-controlled bandwidth-flexible and programmable SDM optical network utilizing sliceable self-homodyne spatial superchannels to support dynamic bandwidth and QoT provisioning, infrastructure slicing and isolation. Results show that SDN is a suitable control plane solution for the high-capacity flexible SDM network. It is able to provision end-to-end bandwidth and QoT requests according to user requirements, considering the unique characteristics of the underlying SDM infrastructure.

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Abstract-The optical cross-connect (OXC) is a key element in current WDM networks. In this context, the design of OXCs is becoming very challenging since it has to fulfil requirements from legacy optical networks and be future-proof to support both legacy lower bitrates and future high-speed super-channels by means of flexible allocation of spectral resources. In this paper we review the novel concept of Architecture on Demand (AoD) to dynamically synthesise architectures suited to the switching and processing requirements of traffic. We propose a technique suited to perform architecture computation and composition and discuss the scalability of the proposed technique. Results show that it is possible to reduce the number of hardware modules used at least by half compared to other conventional architectures.

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