SONEP: A Software-Defined Optical Network Emulation Platform

Network emulation has been one of the tools of choice for conducting experiments on commodity hardware. In the absence of an easy to use optical network test-bed, researchers can significantly benefit from the availability of a flexible/programmable optical network emulation platform. Exploiting the lightweight system virtualization, which is recently supported in modern operating systems, in this work we present the architecture of a Software-Defined Network (SDN) emulation platform for transport optical networks and investigate its usage in a use-case scenario. To the best of our knowledge, this is for the first time that an SDN-based emulation platform is proposed for modeling and performance evaluation of optical networks. Coupled with recent trend of extension of SDN towards transport (optical) networks, the presented tool can facilitate the evaluation of innovative idea before actual implementations and deployments. In addition to the architecture of SONEP, a use-case scenario to evaluate the quality of transmission (QoT) of alien wavelengths in transport optical networks, along with performance results are reported in this piece of work.