Evaluation and experimental demonstration of SDN-enabled flexi-grid optical domain controller based on NETCONF/YANG

Flexible spectrum assignment in Elastic Optical Networks (EON) has emerged as a potential solution for allowing dynamic and elastic management of available bandwidth resources. In this paper, we demonstrate and evaluate our developed flexi-grid optical domain controller based on NETCONF/YANG. Our proposed modular architecture, based on Finite State Machines (FSMs), allows the flexibility to deploy the controller either in a centralized or in a distributed state for on the fly encrypted device management connections. A testbed composed of two physical Sliceable Bandwidth Variable Transponders (SBVTs) and an emulated flexi-grid optical network was used for our software evaluation. Controller startup and synchronization time, as well as media channel setup time are evaluated to compare the two deployment options and assess network scaling effects. Results demonstrate that our software is scalable by maintaining a relatively constant startup time on the networks tested (i.e., 1 to 64 nodes) in both deployment options. Software scalability is also supported by the media channel setup time, which presents a modest log scale growth when increasing the number of nodes from one to 64.