SDN Control of Sliceable Multidimensional (Spectral and Spatial) Transceivers with YANG/NETCONF

Abstract

The combination of spatial division multiplexing (SDM) with flexi-grid wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) enables optical transceivers to provide super-channels that exploit the spectral and spatial dimensions. For the first time to the best of our knowledge, in this paper we extend SDM-WDM transceivers to support sliceability and make effective use of spatial and spectral resources. The proposed architecture provides multiple independent spectral–spatial super-channels (i.e., slices) sharing the same transceiver and exploiting different spectrum/core/mode resources. The proposed architecture also enables us to monitor the bit error rate of the provisioned slices in order to detect any signal-quality degradation due to the provisioning of additional slices. On the other hand, there is a general trend toward the disaggregation of optical networks. In this paper, we also propose the first open application program interface based on a YANG data model and NETCONF protocol for software-defined-networking-enabled sliceable SDM-WDM transceivers. The proposed transceiver is experimentally validated in a joint test bed between CTTC and KDDI research.