Future nationwide optical network architecture for higher availability and operability using transport SDN technologies

Abstract

An optical transport network is composed of optical trans- port systems deployed in thousands of office-buildings. As a common infrastructure to accommodate diversified communication services with drastic traffic growth, it is necessary not only to continuously convey the growing traffic but also to achieve high end-to-end communication qual- ity and availability and provide flexible controllability in cooperation with service layer networks. To achieve high-speed and large-capacity trans- port systems cost-effectively, system configuration, applied devices, and the manufacturing process have recently begun to change, and the cause of failure or performance degradation has become more complex and di- versified. The drastic traffic growth and pattern change of service net- works increase the frequency and scale of transport-capacity increase and transport-network reconfiguration in cooperation with service networks. Therefore, drastic traffic growth affects both optical-transport-system con- figuration and its operational cycles. In this paper, we give an overview of the operational problems emerging in current nationwide optical trans- port networks, and based on trends analysis for system configuration and network-control schemes, we propose a vision of the future nationwide optical-transport-network architecture expressed using five target features.