Towards the Opening of Optical Networks: Horizons and Ongoing Standardization

The Internet architecture and protocols have been extremely successful in recent decades due to their simplicity and scalability with best effort services. The applications were Web-based and contained limited multimedia content. The support for digital media is one of the fastest growing requirements of the Internet as demand transitions from services designed for text and images to those intended to support high quality streaming multimedia. The optical networks are the principal actor to satisfy this requirement. Looking at the near future, emerging network applications are sensitive to latency, jitter, loss rate, and/or flow completion time. Unlike today’s web applications, the new ones are expected to be more complex and to serve a larger number of consumers, pursuing an automatic management and optimization of the service degradation. For example, vehicle-to-everything (V2X) networks require guaranteed network services with low latency and a low loss rate. Even with human consumers, emerging multimedia applications, such as holographic communication, immersive virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and extended reality (XR), telemedicine, remote surgery, and cloud gaming, require much more stringent network quality of service (QoS), including bounded latency and ultra-high throughput. There has been a distinct synergy between the requirements of new applications and the next-generation of optical networks, which must support the rising demand by businesses and consumers for Internet-based communications and services. Fiber optic cables and devices are used across multiple sectors, not just the well-known ones like telecom, but are also critical in data centers, in the military and aerospace, energy utilities, municipal, campus, and other sectors. Fiber optic networks serve as the primary technology approach for high-speed communications around the globe, and telecom service providers and operators are rapidly growing, upgrading fiber optical network infrastructures both in hardware and software. The configuration of optical networks was static, independent from any applications. In the propagation between the source/destination nodes, the application data crossed few or many static optical networks, each having an independent configuration. With new application requirements, each network element must be compatible with a common application software regardless of the adopted hardware. Also each network element of different vendors must be synchronized with respect to a centralized controller, and must react to guarantee that the data traveling along the network is aligned to the application requirements. The optical workstream in MUST focused on optical transport has produced a common and unified set of guidelines that describe a future-proof strategy towards the realization of a disaggregated open optical network. After a general overview of the main aspects concerning optical networks, the aim of this research is to treat as the new application requirements, the interaction between Internet users and their continuous growth have modified and will continue to modify the architecture, the management of optical networks and the business model of Telco service providers. The possible standard to implement automation in future disaggregated optical networks can be a common data model to describe each hardware component of each network optical element as YANG, each network optical element communicates with NETCONF protocol and all is orchestrated by SDN controller ONOS.