PROJECT TITLE :

Emilia Fridman [People in Control]

ABSTRACT:

Emerging use cases, like the orchestration of heterogeneous domains or the interconnection of remote knowledge centers, require the look of new network control, management, and orchestration architectures that are adapted to the wants related to finish-to-finish services. This heterogeneity, stemming from actual deployments, is connected to the involved data and control technologies or thanks to network segmentation. It is acknowledged that, in these scenarios, the deployment of one software- defined networking (SDN) controller may not be sensible or might have elementary limitations, in terms of either scalability, complexity, or interoperability. To deal with this trend, and as a suggests that to address the complexity growth, research in this area is considering the concept of SDN orchestration (the coordinated management of heterogeneous systems), abstraction (the selection of entityrelevant attributes), and the use of multiple controllers, commonly organized in hierarchical or flat configurations. During this paper, we tend to take into account a hybrid approach combining elements from distributed control with components from centralized management, hoping on the ideas of abstraction and aggregation and hierarchical traffic engineering (TE). We tend to propose a multidomain and multivendor network management design organized in layers, the abstract network layer and also the management-specific layer, resulting during a mesh of generic SDN controllers that use generalized multiprotocol label switching (GMPLS) protocols as their east/west interfaces (open shortest path 1st TE and Resource Reservation Protocol with extensions for TE as inter- SDN controller communications protocols), forming an abstracted topology. To validate the approach, and to evaluate factors like end-to-end network service deployment delay or management overhead, the proposed design is implemented and validated during a control plane testbed. While emphasis is given to the control of optical (flexi-grid) networks, the proposed ap- roach will be generalized to different transport technologies.