Are WANs Ready for Optical Topology Programming?

Abstract

In today's wide-area networks, the optical layer is a relatively static and inflexible commodity. In response, Optical Topology Programming (OTP) has been proposed to enable fast and flexible reconfiguration of wavelengths at the optical layer from higher layers. We answer whether WANs are ready for OTP, concluding they are not. We reach this judgement by measuring reconfiguration delay on a long-haul fiber span. To push the needle on OTP towards feasibility, we show how to reduce the time to provision a circuit by an order of magnitude---from minutes to seconds. Finally, we propose a method to quickly store and load optical network equipment settings, reducing the time to less than 1 second.