Abstract

White boxes, originally introduced in data centers, are expected to soon also penetrate the market of wide area networks, since operators see them as a way to drive down capital expenditure. Indeed, white boxes can be composed of modules from different vendors, removing the traditional vendor lock-in and creating more competition in the market, thus reducing hardware costs. In this paper, we describe the experimental demonstration of a fully disaggregated white box, composed of two different types of transponders, monitors (including filtering effect parameter monitors), add-drop multiplexers, and switches. Toward this end, we developed an appropriate control and management plane for the white box based on NETCONF and YANG. Using that, we demonstrated the automatic reconfiguration of the white box so as to maintain the service in the presence of multiple unexpected degradations: signal-to-noise ratio decrease and filtering distortion. We also demonstrated and presented here a vendor-neutral procedure to compute the thresholds used for raising alarms in response to physical layer degradations.

© 2018 IEEE

Enabling fully programmable transponder white boxes [Invited]

Victor Lopez, Wataru Ishida, Arturo Mayoral, Takafumi Tanaka, Oscar Gonzalez de Dios, and Juan Pedro Fernandez-Palacios
J. Opt. Commun. Netw. 12(2) A214-A223 (2020)

Control and Management of Transponders With NETCONF and YANG

M. Dallaglio, N. Sambo, F. Cugini, and P. Castoldi
J. Opt. Commun. Netw. 9(3) B43-B52 (2017)

Locally automated restoration in SDN disaggregated networks

Nicola Sambo
J. Opt. Commun. Netw. 12(6) C23-C30 (2020)

Autonomic Disaggregated Multilayer Networking

Lluís Gifre, Jose-Luis Izquierdo-Zaragoza, Marc Ruiz, and Luis Velasco
J. Opt. Commun. Netw. 10(5) 482-492 (2018)

Open and disaggregated optical transport networks for data center interconnects [Invited]

Chongjin Xie, Lei Wang, Liang Dou, Ming Xia, Sai Chen, Huan Zhang, Zhao Sun, and Jingchi Cheng
J. Opt. Commun. Netw. 12(6) C12-C22 (2020)