Software-Defined Networks for Optical Networks Using Flexible Orchestration: Advances, Challenges, and Opportunities

Abstract

Optical networks offer a wide range of benefits to the telecommunication sector worldwide with their provision of higher bandwidth, which leads to faster data speed, longer transmission distance, and improved latency. Currently, the complexity associated with advancements in optical networks poses problems to network flexibility, reliability, and quality of service. Over the years, many reviews and proposals have been implemented by several literature studies to provide solutions for optical networks using software-defined networks and network service orchestrators. This study reviews the significant challenges in current optical network applications, the various solutions rendered by software-defined networks, and network service orchestration, impediments, and gaps in these software-defined networks. This study will go a step further to look into the various improvements and implementations of software-defined networks tailored to solve specific optical network problems. This study further proposes a flexible orchestration architecture for software-defined networks for solving flexibility and scalability problems in optical networks. This proposal uses an open network system (ONOS) SDN controller, leveraging on dockerisation and Kubernetes clusterisation and orchestration. This solution presents a more flexible, reliable, customable, and higher quality of service, which is an improvement upon current solutions in the literature.

Flexible open network operating system architecture for implementing higher scalability using disaggregated software‐defined optical networking

“…From the performance analysis, based on 250 nodes which was 50% less than what [20] Septian et al used in simulation and analysis. Furthermore, references and indepth was given in Nsafoa et al [22] to review various analysis on SDON ONOS controllers in optical networks for state‐of‐the‐art implementations.…”

An Assessment of Data Transmission Reliability in Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

“…If there is a big enough difference between the routes, the ones with the lower quality won't be chosen to send the data. Path selection algorithms for software-defined networks (SDNs) have been proposed by Nsafoa-Yeboah et al [21]; these algorithms use dual effect factors oriented on the real Quality of Experience (QoE) to guarantee load balancing and connection quality through real-time acquisition of the state, and dynamic weight adjustment, and they also utilize the ant colony technique to boost the transmission rates.…”

Moving Microgrid Hierarchical Control to an SDN-Based Kubernetes Cluster: A Framework for Reliable and Flexible Energy Distribution

“…Likewise, if an application needs to be migrated, SDN can adapt the network routing to reduce recovery time. Compared to traditional networking, which can be time-consuming and error-prone, our proposal offers automated configuration and management that is not restricted to specific conditions [ 28 ].…”