Optical White Box: Modeling and Implementation

Disaggregated optical technologies have the potential to provide cost-effective and vendor-neutral optical node solutions especially suitable for metro networks. Differently from the conventional proprietary networks, specific design, modelling, control and management operations have to be carefully defined and standardized. This paper first presents the most relevant disaggregated optical devices such as transponders, reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexers (ROADMs), and amplifiers, and it discusses the corresponding vendor-neutral YANG models and NETCONF control. Then, the implementation of the related software agents is presented, along with a Software Defined Networking (SDN) controller based on the ONOS open-source framework. The implementations are validated in a disaggregated optical network testbed, showing successful interoperability and experimentally demonstrating transmission with optical power configurations.