Abstract: Network operators generally aim at providing a good level of satisfaction to their customers. Diverse application demands require the usage of beyond best-effort resource allocation mechanisms, particularly in resource-constrained environments. Such mechanisms introduce additional complexity in the control plane and need to be configured appropriately. Within 5G mobile networks, two new mechanisms for QoS-aware resource allocation are introduced.

We provide an overview of SDN control architectures for WDM over SDM (WDMoSDM) optical networks. We address dynamic management of end-to-end connec- tivity services and WDM virtual network topologies (VNTs) for partially disaggregated multi-domain WDMoSDM networks. (27 - 29 September 2021, virtual event)

The hierarchical token bucket (HTB) algorithm allows to specify per-flow bitrate guarantees and enables excess bandwidth sharing between flows of the same class. Additionally, it provides capabilities to prioritize the traffic of specific flows, potentially considering their delay demands. HTB hence constitutes a powerful mechanism to enforce QoS requirements hierarchically and on a fine granular per-flow level, making it an appropriate choice in numerous use-cases.

We study the requirements that Control, Orchestration, and Management (COM) systems for optical networks should fulfil, present a minimal set of components they should implement, and propose our research point of view regarding the future needs for COM systems for optical networks.

Network operators have been dealing with the necessity of a dynamic network resources allocation to provide a new generation of customer-tailored applications. In that sense, Telecom providers have to migrate their BSS/OSS systems and network infrastructure to more modern solutions to introduce end-to-end automation and support the new use cases derived from the 5G adoption and transport network slices. In general, there is a joint agreement on making this transition to an architecture defined by programmable interfaces and standard protocols.

We present the dynamic deployment of logical WDM VNTs by deploying virtual links between ROADM/OXC nodes using spatial channels provided by SDM networks. We propose a cloud-native WDM over SDM (WDMoSDM) SDN orchestrator that is responsible for the lifecycle management of the SDN-enabled WDM VNTs.

We present a streaming mechanism for optical networks based on the Kafka architecture and protocols, to efficiently distribute state and network updates following the upcoming ONF Transport API streaming implementation agreement. The proposed mechanism is validated and experimentally evaluated.