학술논문

Experimental Demonstration of Partially Disaggregated Optical Network Control Using the Physical Layer Digital Twin
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management IEEE Trans. Netw. Serv. Manage. Network and Service Management, IEEE Transactions on. 20(3):2343-2355 Sep, 2023
Subject
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Computing and Processing
Optical fiber networks
Optical amplifiers
Physical layer
Digital twins
Optical control
Transponders
Optical fiber amplifiers
Open optical networks
software-defined networking
multi-vendor
disaggregation
Language
ISSN
1932-4537
2373-7379
Abstract
Optical communications and networking are fast becoming the solution to support ever-increasing data traffic across all segments of the network, expanding from core/metro networks to 5G/6G front-hauling. Therefore, optical networks need to evolve towards an efficient exploitation of the infrastructure by overcoming the closed and aggregated paradigm, to enable apparatus sharing together with the slicing and separation of the optical data plane from the optical control. In addition to the advantages in terms of efficiency and cost reduction, this evolution will increase network reliability, also allowing for a fine trade-off between robustness and maximum capacity exploitation. In this work, an optical network architecture is presented based on the physical layer digital twin of the optical transport used within a multi-layer hierarchical control operated by an intent-based network operating system. An experimental proof of concept is performed on a three-node network including up to 1000 km optical transmission, open re-configurable optical add & drop multiplexers (ROADMs) and whitebox transponders hosting pluggable multirate transceivers. The proposed solution is based on GNPy as the optical physical layer digital twin and ONOS as intent-based network operating system. The reliability of the optical control decoupled by the data plane functioning is experimentally demonstrated exploiting GNPy as open lightpath computation engine and software optical amplifier models derived from the component characterization. Besides the lightpath deployment exploiting the modulation format evaluation given a generic traffic request, the architecture reliability is tested mimicking the use case of an automatic failure recovery from a fiber cut.