Transport network orchestration for end-to-end multilayer provisioning across heterogeneous SDN/OpenFlow and GMPLS/PCE control domains

Abstract

A multidomain optical transport network composed of heterogeneous optical transport technologies (e.g., flexi/fixed-grid optical circuit switching and optical packet switching) and control plane technologies (e.g., centralized OpenFlow or distributed GMPLS) does not naturally interoperate, and a network orchestration mechanism is required. A network orchestrator allows the composition of end-to-end network service provisioning across multidomain optical networks comprising different transport and control plane technologies. Software-defined networking (SDN) is a key technology to address this requirement, since the separation of control and data planes makes the SDN a suitable candidate for end-to-end provisioning service orchestration across multiple domains with heterogeneous control and transport technologies. This paper presents two different network orchestration's architectures based on the application-based network operations (ABNO) which is being defined by IETF based on standard building blocks. Then, we experimentally assesses in the international testbed of the STRAUSS project, an ABNO-based network orchestrator for end-to-end multi-layer (OPS and Flexi-grid OCS) and multidomain provisioning across heterogeneous control domains (SDN/OpenFlow and GMPLS/Stateful PCE) employing dynamic domain abstraction based on virtual node aggregation.