Control Plane Architectures Enabling Transport Network Adaptive and Autonomic Operation

The maturity and flexibility of Software Defined Networking principles, favouring centralized control deployments, featured application programming interfaces and the development of a related application ecosystem, has paved the way for the design and implementation of advanced and adapted control plane architectures that specially target and enable efficient and massive monitoring and data collection. In this line, the steady increase in the use of open and standard interfaces and data modelling languages, as well as the wide adoption (in a vendor independent way) of model-driven solutions and a unified approach for data collection and processing facilitates shifting the focus to the actual processing of information, towards autonomic networks and self-* capabilities. Scoped to the control of a flexi-grid optical transport network, and in line with major industry trends, in this paper we cover our requirements for efficient data collection and processing, and we propose and detail a control and management architecture, building on the concepts of front-end and back-end entities, dynamic instantiation of control plane functions within the ETSI NFV framework and the applicability to use cases such as in-operation network planning, on-demand network optimization and parameter tuning.