Integration of Legacy Non-SDN Optical ROADMs in a Software Defined Network

Abstract

International audienceOptical networks are well known to offer high rate bandwidth by sending data over light wavelengths. Those optical networks are composed of fiber optics, amplifiers, reconfigurable optical add drop multiplexer (ROADMs), etc. Nowadays, we wish to manage and monitor that type of networks, especially the ROADMs, flexibly and intelligently by integrating Software Defined Network (SDN) in optical networks. Unfortunately, legacy ROADMs aren't SDN compatible yet. They have all the basic optical functionalities we wish to deploy (offered via the SNMP protocol in our case). However, we aren't always able to update hardware or software in the ROADMs to adapt legacy ROADMs to SDN architecture. The proposed architecture in this article, a proxy that translates OpenFlow messages sent by ONOS into SNMP messages to configure the ROADMs and conversely, is a solution. This solution allows not only to flexibly monitor and manage an optical network via SDN architecture, but also to recover and reroute wavelengths when a link is down. It is also the most adapted solution to legacy networks because it doesn't require any upgrade on the optical network elements

A Dynamic Approach to MIB Polling for Software Defined Monitoring

“…For example, with 4 active Switch agent, similar average polling times are observed by using both NMS and proposed approach, which is less than 1sec. However, the average polling time can be very high i.e., up to several minutes, whereas our MIB controller agent does not require any MIB Manager from the application plane and anticipates that latency can be shorten and polling time is minimized as shown in the figure With 16 Active Switch Agents, the figure shows that the average polling time can be up to 36 sec, whereas the proposed approach shows that the average polling time can be few seconds. The impact of the retransmissions can be observed in Figure 9, the overall packet drop was less than 1% when the number of Active MIB Switch is 4 using both approaches and it has increased up to 11% when the number of switches has increased to 16 using the NMS MIB polling approach.…”

“…In [16], a software defined monitoring architecture has been deployed using SNMP protocol for Optical Non-SDN ROADMs.…”

Performance Evaluation of Next-Generation Data Plane Architectures and their Components

“…The method of transparently processing OpenFlow messages is not particularly new. Similar techniques are used for network virtualization [119][120][121], to realize hypervisor functionality [122], to interoperate with non-SDN legacy net-work equipment [123] or to transparently deal with flow table limitations [124]. The novelty of our approach is that developers can easily create and deploy their own translation application for every possible control channel protocol, without extensive changes to the network operating system or the control apps, which simplifies rapid prototyping and research work.…”

Dynamic LightPath Allocation in WDM Networks Using an SDN Controller

“…Reference [39] uses a proxy application to control a WDM network device with the SDN controller. The authors have considered an end-to-end connection between devices as an optical link and used Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) to get the features of the switch; hence, the internal fabric connectivity is hidden from the controller.…”