Reliable Optical Networks with ODTN: Resiliency and Fail-over in Data and Control Planes

This article reports a technical demonstration showing the use of the ONOS SDN controller for disaggregated transport networks, summarizing the latest developments and results within the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) Open Disaggregated Transport Networks (ODTN) project. The demonstration mainly covers the dynamic provisioning of data connectivity services and advanced automatic failure recovery, both at the control and data plane levels. For the provisioning, we demonstrate the usage of open and standard protocols and interfaces. For the recovery part, we first demonstrate, covering the control plane, how ONOS can behave as a logically centralized controller while using multiple coordinated instances for robustness. We show how the different devices remain under control even in the event of a failure of one of such instances, relying on the ATOMIX framework and the dynamic real-time negotiation of device mastership. For the data plane, we demonstrate the capabilities of the controller to perform automatic restoration of optical services.