April 2017
Spotlight Summary by Werner Weiershausen
Highly Available SDN Control of Flexi-Grid Networks With Network Function Virtualization-Enabled Replication
Highly automated telecommunication networks are one of the major future targets for network operators in order to reduce the high maintenance costs they are still facing today. Moreover, they shall be the enabler for creation and fast provisioning of new upcoming services. Most of today’s legacy telecommunication platforms are still very static, and the handling of a multi-vendor, multi-OSI-layer, and multi-service environment is getting increasingly difficult and costly. Software Defined Networking (SDN) in combination with Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and a seamless interdigitation of transport networks with cloud-based data centers, holding all needed service and infrastructure data, are a key to modernize the legacy telecommunication world.
Ramon Casellas, Ricard Vilalta, Ricardo Martınez, and Raul Münoz from the Centre Tecnologic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC) have demonstrated, by concept and experimental implementation, a novel highly efficient SDN/NFV-based control architecture that meets several basic carrier-grade requirements of telecommunication operators. In this context, it should be highlighted that the new control design applies vendor-interoperable standard protocols (PCEP, BGP-LS, OSPF-TE, GMPLS, OpenStack), which is a major prerequisite for carriers seeking an open vendor competition environment. The paper describes a solution for SDN use cases that incorporate different OSI layers. So, for instance, an automated multi-layer network resource optimization can be performed by taking into account the IP router layer as well as the optical fiber network with Wavelength-Division-Multiplex (WDM) and state-of-the-art Reconfigurable Optical Add-Drop Multiplexers (ROADM).
A significant achievement by the authors’ control platform design is its highly resilient architecture being an important requirement for network operators. The solution exhibits well-synchronized Path-Computation Element (PCE) replicas that can be organized in a self-healing distributed data center cloud environment. In addition to that, other SDN control instances, such as replica reflectors, can be duplicated and thus protected against system outages. Although such robust overall solutions are based on a highly meshed connectivity and corresponding control of overhead signaling between duplicated control entities, the experimental setup showed impressive results regarding scalability and performance.
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Ramon Casellas, Ricard Vilalta, Ricardo Martınez, and Raul Münoz from the Centre Tecnologic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC) have demonstrated, by concept and experimental implementation, a novel highly efficient SDN/NFV-based control architecture that meets several basic carrier-grade requirements of telecommunication operators. In this context, it should be highlighted that the new control design applies vendor-interoperable standard protocols (PCEP, BGP-LS, OSPF-TE, GMPLS, OpenStack), which is a major prerequisite for carriers seeking an open vendor competition environment. The paper describes a solution for SDN use cases that incorporate different OSI layers. So, for instance, an automated multi-layer network resource optimization can be performed by taking into account the IP router layer as well as the optical fiber network with Wavelength-Division-Multiplex (WDM) and state-of-the-art Reconfigurable Optical Add-Drop Multiplexers (ROADM).
A significant achievement by the authors’ control platform design is its highly resilient architecture being an important requirement for network operators. The solution exhibits well-synchronized Path-Computation Element (PCE) replicas that can be organized in a self-healing distributed data center cloud environment. In addition to that, other SDN control instances, such as replica reflectors, can be duplicated and thus protected against system outages. Although such robust overall solutions are based on a highly meshed connectivity and corresponding control of overhead signaling between duplicated control entities, the experimental setup showed impressive results regarding scalability and performance.
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Article Information
Highly Available SDN Control of Flexi-Grid Networks With Network Function Virtualization-Enabled Replication
Ramon Casellas, Ricard Vilalta, Ricardo Martínez, and Raül Muñoz
J. Opt. Commun. Netw. 9(2) A207-A215 (2017) View: Abstract | HTML | PDF