How Celtic-Plus project 'SENDATE' is simplifying operations of open optical networks

SENDATE, the Celtic-Plus flagship project for secure networking of data centers in Europe, has announced successful completion of an industry-first multi-vendor SDN field trial featuring real-time planning of transparent high-speed services across a disaggregated, multi-domain optical network.

The SENDATE trial showcased the critical role that standards-based SDN interworking and integrated planning play in simplifying operations and reducing end-to-end provisioning times in multi-domain, disaggregated optical networks.

Conducted this month in the Telia Company R&D lab in Stockholm with live connectivity to production network fibers, the multi-vendor, multi-domain trial included participation from optical networking and SDN solution suppliers and research partners, including ADVA, Coriant, highstreet technologies, VPIphotonics, and the RISE Research Institutes of Sweden.

“As new high-bandwidth end-user applications drive increased demand for photonic layer connectivity, service providers face the real-world challenge of provisioning across multi-vendor optical networks. Today these networks are operated as separate domains involving proprietary and mostly offline planning,” said Mauro Costa, director, network and infra architecture, Telia Company. “An open and integrated approach to multi-domain service planning helps solve this challenge. In combination with SDN-based orchestration of multi-vendor transport elements, including open line systems, integrated and real-time service planning paves the way for a more agile and automated optical infrastructure capable of meeting stringent performance demands of new services, including 5G.”

“As new high-bandwidth end-user applications drive increased demand for photonic layer connectivity, service providers face the real-world challenge of provisioning across multi-vendor optical networks.”

Based on the SENDATE SDN control architecture, the multi-vendor trial configuration was designed to demonstrate end-to-end wavelength service activation between disaggregated transponders spanning SDN-enabled ADVA and Coriant optical domains. Use cases tested during the trial included dynamic optical reach planning using open APIs and SDN-enabled 100Gbit/s and 200Gbit/s alien wavelength provisioning across multi-vendor optical domains. The successful interworking leveraged an extension of the standardized ONF T-API interface significantly enhanced and extended with optical impairment capabilities for automated network planning. The SDN controller was based on OpenDaylight with an integrated photonic planning app running as a micro-service.

This work has been performed in the framework of Celtic-Plus project SENDATE by the sub-projects SENDATE-Secure-DCI and SENDATE-FICUS, and it is partly funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, BMBF, and the Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems, Vinnova.