At the OSA Optical Fiber and Communications Conference (OFC 2021), a team that included researchers from the University of Arizona, Trinity College Dublin, and Tyndall National Institute – University College Cork (Ireland), presented their demonstration “SDN-Controlled Dynamic Front-Haul Provisioning, Emulated on Hardware and Virtual COSMOS Optical x-Haul Testbeds” [1].
The experimental scenario modeled dynamic provisioning and routing of digitized RF streams across a metro front-haul network, in response to a diurnally varying schedule of office and residential traffic demands.
The demonstration showed the experimental scenario running on the COSMOS optical x-Haul testbed, as well as a virtual testbed created in Mininet-Optical, a software emulator that the team is developing for modeling SDN-controlled, disaggregated packet-optical networks as part of the NSF COSM-IC project.
In the demonstration video below, researchers Aamir Quraishy and Jiakai Yu show how the same SDN controller code can control both the virtual network in Mininet-Optical as well as the hardware network in the COSMOS testbed.
Creating a virtual testbed in a software emulator like Mininet-Optical can assist researchers who wish to prototype, develop, and debug novel packet-optical SDN control algorithms and software before testing them on a hardware testbed. Software emulators can also be used in tutorials or course labs, or to explore larger network configurations beyond those that might be supported by a particular hardware testbed.
[1] B. Lantz, J. Yu, A. Bhardwaj, A. Diaz-Montiel, A. Quraishy, S. Santaniello, T. Chen, R. Fujieda, A. Mukhopadhyay, G. Zussman, M. Ruffini, and D. Kilper, “SDN-controlled dynamic front-haul provisioning, emulated on hardware and virtual COSMOS optical x-haul testbeds,” in Proc. OSA OFC’21, M2B.8, 2021. [download] [presentation] [demo video]
