Control Plane Solutions for Sliceable Bandwidth Variable Transceivers in Elastic Optical Networks

Elastic Optical Networks (EON) are characterized by a flexible grid in which the so called "frequency slots" are allocated dynamically and based on the client signal data rate and modulation format and rely on bandwidth variable transceivers (BVT) and bandwidth variable cross-connects (OXC). A control plane(CP) is used for the efficient and dynamic provisioning of optical connections with recovery. Such emerging optical technologies bring new requirements to the CP related to the efficient flexible spectrum allocation, co-routed connection setup and dynamic and low latency configuration of optical parameters. Two main CP architectures coexist, with functions like end-point and node addressing, automatic topology discovery, network abstraction, path computation and connection provisioning: the distributed Generalized Multi Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) - with optional Path Computation Element (PCE) and instantiation/modification - and a control plane based on Software Defined Networking (SDN) with a logically centralized controller and an open protocol such as OpenFlow. The design of such a CP should involve the abstraction and modeling of the aforementioned new optical devices, and the integration of their capabilities and restrictions. In this paper, we report the specific activities related to integrating (sliceable) bandwidth variable transceivers both into GMPLS and OpenFlow. We define protocol extensions that are experimentally evaluated in scenarios deployed in test beds.