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FEATURE SOFTWARE-DEFINED NETWORKING


engineer installs it, you turn up that wavelength and now you make it available for services. ‘Tat model is slow but the reason that service


providers have tended to force vendors to do it is they don’t want to buy transponders until they have a revenue-generating service demand that’s going to pay for it. But the end result is that their network may become less responsive. It may actually resist automation because if ever there is a process where you’ve got to call up an engineer and install a transponder that is going to resist automation by a control plane because there is a human operation in the process.’ he said. One of the first enhancements Infinera made


to its super-channel product was to allow customers to spread out the cost of buying 500 Gb/s wavelength of bandwidth when they might not need it all on day one. Bennett explained: ‘Instead of buying it all in one chunk, we install it all in one chunk – in other words the carrier does one set of wavelength planning, they have one visit by the engineer, but then they pay for the individual 100G wavelengths one at a time. With this approach you can have spare capacity in your network that could be controlled by a control plane but you’re not paying for it.’


Tis is the best of both worlds, he says.


‘You’ve got the pay as you grow model where you send engineers to install transponders, but you’ve also got instant bandwidth. Tat’s one of the reasons why our network architecture has always been very amenable to control by protocols like GMPLS or now by SDN.’


Virtualised photons Tis trend is driven by the need to virtualise as many functions in the network as you possibly can, but one thing you can’t really virtualise is the production of photons, says Bennett. ‘Whatever is cranking out those photons has got to be a physical thing. What Infinera has been able to do is to give carriers a degree of flexibility on that physical thing that cranks out photons.’ Clearly if a carrier wants to have flexible


control of its optical capacity then there needs to be a degree of flexibility built into that optical capacity. Unlike soſtware control in the higher layers of the network, which optimally allocate packet-based traffic to the available capacity, transport SDN has the greatest potential value for carriers whose networks have an agile amount of capacity. In other words, the


capabilities of the underlying hardware will influence what the soſtware can do. Te interesting question is when other


carriers will follow Pacnet’s lead. Te research and education networks are at the front of the queue. One of Infinera’s customers is GÉANT, the pan-European research network for the education community in Europe. ‘Tey’re fascinated by the whole SDN thing,’ said Bennett. Tey have these designated set of customers which are the European research and education networks, and they desperately want to give those customers the option to control their own destiny. An SDN capability with a customer portal would be perfect for them.’ He added: ‘Quite rightly the point that we’re


at now is that service providers are asking the questions, what am I going to use this for, what value would it be to me? In answering that question you have to look at their network. For example, if they’re predominantly a point-to- point network architecture, they probably don’t need to get involved in SDN. If they’ve got a highly meshed network with customers who are asking for more control, more visibility of their services, like Pacnet, then SDN is exactly what they need in order to innovate.’l


ONDM 2015 19th International Conference on


Optical Network Design and Modeling May 11-14, 2015 - Pisa, Italy – ondm2015.sssup.it


The 19th edition of the Optical Networks Design and Modelling (ONDM) Conference will be held in Pisa, Italy on May 11-14, 2015 and it is organized by Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna (SSSA), and Consorzio Nazionale Interuniversitario per le Telecomunicazioni (CNIT). The ONDM 2015 venue is the main building of the Institute of Communication, Information and Perception Technologies (TeCIP) of SSSA.


Along with the tradition of previous editions, ONDM 2015 will address cutting-edge research in established areas such as optical networking, optical systems, as well as emerging topics like novel Internet architectures, new optical network architectures for the Cloud/DataCenter, wireless optical networks and photonic integrated networks. The event is organized over 3 full days including keynote lectures, invited papers, regular papers and a workshop organized by the FP7 PACE project. Keynote lecturers are Prof. Martin Maier (INRS, Canada), Dr. Clarence Filsfils (Cisco Systems), and Dr. Antonio Manzalini (Telecom Italia).


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