SMART-A: An SDN Application for Reconfiguring Optical Networks

Abstract

Network operators have cope with the never stopping traffic growth and also with the new service dynamicity, due to the increase of data-center and 5G traffic, video service and caching. With multimedia traffic more and more dominant with respect to voice, network operators have reduced their revenues and need to reduce the overall network costs associated to the management. To deal with traffic and operator requirements, new control and management paradigms became necessary and are based mainly on software-defined networking (SDN) architecture, which improve network flexibility and manageability. In this paper we presented SMART-A, an SDN-application prototype able to reconfigure the optical network in case of defragmentation, due to the sub-optimal spectrum resource occupation, and re-routing, due to optical connection failure caused by physical degradation of the optical medium.