Entropy-Driven Adaptive INT and Its Applications in Network Automation of IP-Over-EONs

Recently, IP over elastic optical network (IP-over-EON) has become a promising architecture for metro and core networks. This work studies how to visualize both layers of an IP-over-EON in real time, at different granularities (e.g., at flow-level, lightpath-level, and link-level), and with self-adaptivity. Specifically, we consider the multilayer application of in-band telemetry (INT) and propose entropy-driven adaptive INT (namely, EntropyINT). We introduce stateful processing to programmable data plane (PDP) switches for EntropyINT, such that they can make local decisions to determine whether and what type of telemetry data about the IP and EON layers should be encoded in each packet. The local decisions are designed to be based on the amount of information that can be conveyed by telemetry data to the network automation system. Meanwhile, we make EntropyINT cooperate with out-of-band monitoring, to detect and locate exceptions in the EON layer. Our proposal is implemented in a real-world testbed of IP-over-EON, to evaluate its assistance to network automation. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of our proposal, and indicate that the telemetry data collected by EntropyINT and out-of-band monitoring can better assist the machine learning in network automation, for status prediction and anomaly detection.