Infinera Corp of Sunnyvale, CA, USA, a vertically integrated manufacturer of digital optical network systems incorporating its own indium phosphide-based photonic integrated circuits (PICs), has announced what it says is the telecommunication industry's first successful demonstration of a prototype Software Defined Network (SDN) Open Transport Switch (OTS) in partnership with the US Department of Energy's Energy Sciences Network's (ESnet) Long Island Metropolitan Area Network (LIMAN) control plane test bed.
Infinera says that the proof-of-concept demonstration , extending the concepts and benefits of SDN to the dynamic optical transport layer. The OTS concept is a lightweight virtual transport switch that may be deployed on optical transport systems to interface with a SDN Controller via an extended version of the OpenFlow protocol. This approach has the potential to facilitate application-driven control over transport bandwidth services, including converged wavelength, OTN and packet transport technologies. By enabling multi-layer coordination and control, service providers will potentially be able to leverage Transport SDN to improve the utilization and efficiency of their network infrastructure, increase network resiliency, and deploy new services more rapidly while simplifying and automating operations, says the firm.
In the demonstration, Infinera tested a prototype of the OTS running on the Infinera DTN platform, allowing ESnet's optical transport network to be configured by an SDN controller via the OpenFlow protocol. ESnet enhanced its SDN controller and demonstrated on-demand bandwidth Ethernet services including bandwidth elasticity for data-intensive science experiments at Brookhaven National Laboratory on their LIMAN network, spanning from Manhattan, NY, to Upton, NY. The services were provisioned by a high-capacity bandwidth-on-demand application utilizing the SDN controller in three different transport network abstractions, including one based on Infinera's standards-based GMPLS control plane, showcasing the potential to deploy Transport SDN in networks with existing control planes in production.
In order to implement OTS and extend SDN to the transport layer, the contributing platforms that are used to build this layer must be able to virtualize the digital and optical resources. Infinera's Bandwidth Virtualization provides this abstraction by leveraging the integration of a standards-based GMPLS software control plane, integrated OTN switching and PIC technology, providing a massive, shareable and programmable pool of optical transport capacity.
Brookhaven National Lab's networking team and researchers used this SDN platform to experiment with ultra-high speed data transfer applications being developed for next-generation networks using RDMA over Ethernet protocols.
"Big data applications hosted at BNL and other DOE national labs routinely move petabytes of data over LAN and WAN and require the capability of fully utilizing the current and next generation of 100Gbps networks," said Scott Bradley, manager of Network Services at Brookhaven National Laboratory. "Software defined networks helps us to meet this challenge and allows us to implement and validate the data transport protocols/software intra-data centers and over WAN in the speed of 100Gbps and beyond."
