Toward Disaster-Resilient Optical Networks with Open and Disaggregated Subsystems [Invited]

Novel open and disaggregated optical-networking technologies promise to enhance multi-vendor interoperability thanks to their open interfaces in both data-plane and control/management-plane (C/M-plane). From the viewpoint of disaster resilience in optical networks, such interoperability will significantly improve the flexibility in product selection with regard to replacing damaged subsystems with products of different vendors. In this paper, we discuss various approaches for rapid post-disaster recovery in optical networks (including legacy optical networks) employing disaggregated subsystems, namely, the emergency first-aid unit (FAU) with open application programming interfaces and protocols. We address the following problems (and introduce the solutions that we are currently investigating): (1) how to take advantage of the new disaggregated resources and surviving legacy optical resources to achieve early recovery, (2) how to achieve integrated control of FAUs and non-FAU legacy ROADMs, and (3) how to quickly recreate the lost optical performance monitoring (OPM) capability with FAUs and perform a robust telemetry under the restricted bandwidth in the degraded C/M-plane networks.