Software Defined Optical Networks (SDONs): A Comprehensive Survey

TL;DR

This survey reviews the development, challenges, and future directions of Software Defined Optical Networks (SDONs), highlighting their potential to enhance optical network flexibility and virtualization through SDN principles.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of SDON research across infrastructure, control, and application layers, and discusses open challenges and future research directions.

Findings

SDONs enable flexible and virtualized optical networks.

Major challenges include handling optical component characteristics and multilayer orchestration.

Future research should focus on addressing these challenges and developing standardized solutions.

Abstract

The emerging Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm separates the data plane from the control plane and centralizes network control in an SDN controller. Applications interact with controllers to implement network services, such as network transport with Quality of Service (QoS). SDN facilitates the virtualization of network functions so that multiple virtual networks can operate over a given installed physical network infrastructure. Due to the specific characteristics of optical (photonic) communication components and the high optical transmission capacities, SDN based optical networking poses particular challenges, but holds also great potential. In this article, we comprehensively survey studies that examine the SDN paradigm in optical networks; in brief, we survey the area of Software Defined Optical Networks (SDONs). We mainly organize the SDON studies into studies focused on the infrastructure layer, the control layer, and the application layer. Moreover, we cover SDON studies focused on network virtualization, as well as SDON studies focused on the orchestration of multilayer and multidomain networking. Based on the survey, we identify open challenges for SDONs and outline future directions.