Design and performance evaluation of an OpenFlow-based control plane for software-defined elastic optical networks...

Area of Science:

• Optical networking
• Telecommunications

Background:

• Elastic optical networks require efficient high-speed signal transmission.
• Direct-detection optical OFDM (DDO-OFDM) offers a simpler, potentially lower-cost alternative to Coherent Optical OFDM (CO-OFDM).

Purpose of the Study:

• To design and deploy a software-defined networking (SDN) control plane for DDO-OFDM in elastic optical networks.
• To validate the performance of an OpenFlow-based control plane in a DDO-OFDM elastic optical network environment.

Main Methods:

• Extended OpenFlow protocol for network control.
• Developed a routing and spectrum assignment algorithm.
• Designed and deployed an SDN control plane architecture.
• Performed experimental validation of the DDO-OFDM network.

Main Results:

• Successfully designed and deployed an OpenFlow-based SDN control plane for DDO-OFDM.
• Quantitatively measured the performance of the DDO-OFDM elastic optical network with the SDN control plane.
• Demonstrated the feasibility of DDO-OFDM for metro and short/medium core networks.

Conclusions:

• The developed OpenFlow-based control plane is the first reported for DDO-OFDM elastic optical networks.
• DDO-OFDM with SDN presents a viable, low-cost solution for elastic optical networks, particularly in metro and core network segments.