[It is exciting to see the recent announcements from ESnet and
Infinera of their first Transport SDN demo.
As many readers of this blog I have been a long advocate of Transport
SDN – which is the fundamental design concept of UCLP (User Controlled
Lightpaths). Transport SDN allows fiber infrastructure to partition their
network into separate management domains OR create a single domain optical
network that spans many separate independent optical management domains or
infrastructure facilities.
For example, a major forward thinking R&E network is shortly
going to make an announcement about how they are going to enter into a
partnership with a commercial fiber supplier
to partition the network into both a commercial
and R&E facility. The commercial provider owns the fiber and the Transport SDN
boxes, but will create two separate management domains – one for the R&E
network and one for the commercial operator.
The R&E network can populate the optical transport boxes with its
own optical transport cards and manage them independently of the commercial
cards with Transport SDN. Transport SDN also allows the R&E Network to
integrate wavelengths or fiber from multiple suppliers to build their own topology with
their own independent management and control planes at both the optical and IP
layers. Major Fortune 500 companies who operate their own networks have been
looking for this capability for years.
The big advantage of Transport SDN in partnering with commercial
providers for R&E networks is that it can significantly reduce the cost of
deploying an optical R&E network. It also allows national or regional R&E
networks to share infrastructure with other R&E networks, but allowing each
network to manage its own set of wavelengths as part of its management domain. In
times of funding constraints partnering with commercials suppliers or regional networks
can be a major cost saving, especially in less populated regions.
Transport SDN will
also allow the creation of a global R&E network infrastructure that does not depend on a traditional telco hierarchical
network infrastructure, to paraphrase Tolkien of “one network to rule them all, one network
to bind them all”. Instead different single optical management domains can be
created from wavelengths from participating R&E networks to create “discipline
or application specific” networks. For
example recently several international networks in partnership with Internet 2 have
agreed to back each other up in case of an outage. With Transport SDN each network can extend
its management and control plane across each other’s infrastructure in order to
provide automatic re-routing and backup between what would normally be totally independent
networks.
It goes without saying that Transport SDN is also the fundamental concept underlying the deployment of zero carbon optical networks.
For additional information on Transport SDN
ESnet and Infinera Announcement of Transport SDN pilot
Some earlier papers on Transport SDN:
http://www.uclp.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=50&Itemid=9
--BSA]
R&E Network and Green Internet Consultant.
email:
Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog:
http://green-broadband.blogspot.ca/
skype: Pocketpro