At ON.Lab we envision future networks to consist of white boxes everywhere. This revolution was started in the data center, where people realized commodity hardware is the best way to achieve hyper scale while still guaranteeing performance and reliability. In this context, we should mention the work done by the Open Compute Project, the de facto standard for all kinds of data center equipment, including servers and packet switches. The R-CORD project has taken this one step further by driving commoditization of access network technologies, in particular fiber-based PON hardware. This page deals with our activities around building white box ROADM equipment, the corner stone of optical metro and transport networks.
It turns out that optical transport equipment is one of the last networking industries where vertical integration is the only available choice. The key component is the ROADM (Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexer), a type of optical switch that is usually based on WSS (Wavelength Selective Switch) technology. Today, a handful of vendors / system integrators sell chassis-based, fully integrated solutions that are typically controlled using vendor-proprietary interfaces. The TL1 protocol is most commonly used and is also around 30 years old; most vendors use TL1 and add their own proprietary messages. On top of this control plane interoperability issue, the data planes from different vendors are also incompatible, meaning
Our work can be considered. To achieve the vision of having both control and data plane interoperability, requires a lot of cooperation and standardization among vendors. The Open ROADM MSA, launched by AT&T, Ciena, Fujitsu, and Nokia, is a critical step in this process, that aims to achieve data plane interoperability among vendors.
At ON.Lab we have built a partnership between some of the leading component and system vendors in the optical networking industry, and built the first disaggregated ROADM using open source software and commodity hardware. We disaggregated based on three ROADM functions:
Additional components that will be integrated in the near future are muxponders (consider this a more capable transponder), as well as inline fiber amplifiers and optical protection switches, ultimately leading to a fully open line system.
The table below summarizes the different APIs that each component must support. These ensure ONOS core can detect the device and its capabilities, drive cross connect provisioning, and configure various parameters on the devices such as power, alarms, and transmission values.
API | Transponder | Degree | Backplane | Amplifier | Protection Switch | Description | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
DeviceProvider | Discover device and its ports, and register available resources | Relies on PortDiscovery and LambdaQuery behaviors | |||||
FlowRuleProgrammable | Provisioning of cross connections | ||||||
PortAdmin | Enable and disable ports | ||||||
TransponderConfig | Get/set transponder parameters (power, modulation, FEC, ...) | Under development | |||||
PowerConfig<Direction> | Get/set power levels on a port basis | Depending on technology used, backplane and protection switch are read-only | |||||
PowerConfig<OchSignal> | Get/set power levels on a wavelength basis | ||||||
AlarmConfig | Configure alarms, priorities, policies, ... | Under development | |||||
ProtectionConfig | Configure automatic protection switching |
In terms of control protocols, many of the devices we use are prototypes and thus there is a lot of diversity. It is clear however that the optical networking industry is rapidly moving towards a NETCONF/YANG solution.
Disaggregation implies some of the functions that are traditionally integrated on the devices, need to be virtualized and as such (partially) moved to the network OS. Two such functions are of great importance in optical networks.
The API work
TODO
LambdaQuery
to register wavelength resources as part of your driver, automatically called by ResourceDeviceListener
when a device/port is registeredHere's a list of additional topics that need work, and we kindly invite the community to work with us and tackle some of these challenges.