SDN-Enabled Dynamic Feedback Control and Sensing in Agile Optical Networks

Abstract

Fiber optic networks are no longer just pipelines for transporting data in the long haul backbone. Exponential growth in traffic in metro-regional areas has pushed higher capacity fiber toward the edge of the network, and highly dynamic patterns of heterogeneous traffic have emerged that are often bursty, severely stressing the historical "fat and dumb pipe" static optical network, which would need to be massively over-provisioned to deal with these loads. What is required is a more intelligent network with a span of control over the optical as well as electrical transport mechanisms which enables handling of service requests in a fast and efficient way that guarantees quality of service (QoS) while optimizing capacity efficiency. An "agile" optical network is a reconfigurable optical network comprised of high speed intelligent control system fed by real-time in situ network sensing. It provides fast response in the control and switching of optical signals in response to changing traffic demands and network conditions. This agile control of optical signals is enabled by pushing switching decisions downward in the network stack to the physical layer. Implementing such agility is challenging due to the response dynamics and interactions of signals in the physical layer. Control schemes must deal with issues such as dynamic power equalization, EDFA transients and cascaded noise effects, impairments due to self-phase modulation and dispersion, and channel-to-channel cross talk. If these issues are not properly predicted and mitigated, attempts at dynamic control can drive the optical network into an unstable state. In order to enable high speed actuation of signal modulators and switches, the network controller must be able to make decisions based on predictive models. In this thesis, we consider how to take advantage of Software Defined Networking (SDN) capabilities for network reconfiguration, combined with embedded models that access updates from deployed network monitoring sensors. In order to maintain signal quality while optimizing network resources, we find that it is essential to model and update estimates of the physical link impairments in real-time. In this thesis, we consider the key elements required to enable an agile optical network, with contributions as follows: *Control Framework: extended the SDN concept to include the optical transport network through extensions to the OpenFlow (OF) protocol. A unified SDN control plane is built to facilitate control and management capability across the electrical/packet-switched and optical/circuit-switched portions of the network seamlessly. The SDN control plane serves as a platform to abstract the resources of multilayer/multivendor networks. Through this platform, applications can dynamically request the network resources to meet their service requirements. *Use of In-situ Monitors: enabled real-time physical impairment sensing in the control plane using in-situ Optical Performance Monitoring (OPM) and bit error rate (BER) analyzers. OPM and BER values are used as quantitative indicators of the link status and are fed to the control plane through a high-speed data collection interface to form a closed-loop feedback system to enable adaptive resource allocation. *Predictive Network Model: used a network model embedded in the control layer to study the link status. The estimated results of network status is fed into the control decisions to precompute the network resources. The performance of the network model can be enhanced by the sensing results. *Real-Time Control Algorithms: investigated various dynamic resource allocation mechanisms supporting an agile optical network. Intelligent routing and wavelength switching for recovering from traffic impairments is achieved experimentally in the agile optical network within one second. A distance-adaptive spectrum allocation scheme to address transmission impairments caused by cascaded Wavelength Selective Switches (WSS) is proposed and evaluated for improving network spectral efficiency.