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

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.