Abstract: Software-defined elastic optical networks (SD-EONs) provide operators more flexibility to customize their optical infrastructures dynamically. By leveraging infrastructureas-a-service (IaaS), virtual SD-EONs (vSD-EONs) can be realized to further enhance the adaptivity of SD-EONs and shorten the time-to-market of new services. In this paper, we design and demonstrate the building and operating of quality-of-service (QoS) aware survivable vSDEONs that are equipped with transparent data plane (DP) resiliency. Specifically, when slicing a vSD-EON, our network hypervisor (NHV) chooses to use "1:1" virtual link (VL) protection or on-demand VL remapping as the DP restoration scheme, according to the service-level agreement (SLA) between the vSD-EON's operator and the infrastructure provider (InP). Then, during an actual substrate link (SL) failure, the NHV realizes automatic DP restoration that are transparent to the controllers of vSD-EONs. We build a semi-practical network testbed to demonstrate the creation of QoS-aware survivable vSD-EONs, the activation of lightpaths in the vSD-EONs to support upper-layer applications, and the automatic and simultaneous QoSaware DP restorations during an SL failure. The experimental results indicate that our vSD-EON slicing system can build QoS-aware survivable vSD-EONs on-demand, operate them to set up lightpaths for carrying real application traffics, and facilitate differentiated DP restorations during SL failures to recover the vSD-EONs' services according to their SLAs.
Lastly, REF further enhances SD-EONS with virtual SD-EONs to show autonomous quality of service (QoS)-aware lightpath activation and restoration.
Experimental demonstration of building and operating QoS-aware survivable vSD-EONs with transparent resiliency
Optics express
Optics express
Physics Medicine