Dynamic Configuration of Optical Physical Layer Using SDN and Optical Network Description Language

Abstract

Optical networks, which were once considered to be static, are now becoming more flexible and dynamic. Software-defined networking (SDN) has an essential role in the provisioning and management of these networks. There is also a requirement to describe the heterogeneous network resources in a unified manner to the SDN controller. In this paper, we develop a novel semantic framework called Optical Network Description Language (ONDL) which is used to describe entities in the optical network. We show its applicability by emulating a physical layer topology and its control using the developed SDN controller based on ONDL. For any network event, we obtain the response time as <100 ms and observe that the total time to configure a device is dependent upon the individual node configuration time.