IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION 1

Quality of Transmission Awareness in

Converged Electronic and Optical Networks with OpenFlow
Weiyang Mo, Jun He, Member, IEEE, M. M Karbassian, John Wissinger, and Nasser Peyghambarian
AbstractOpenFlow, as a unied operator-friendly manage-
able network control approach, has benets of supporting the
convergence of electronic packet and optical circuit networks
[1] as well as quality-of-transmission (QoT) awareness. We ex-
perimentally present the QoT-awareness in converged OpenFlow
networks with (i) QoT-aware wavelength reassignment (ii) QoT-
aware path re-routing if the QoT is below the requirement. The
experimental work validates efcient networking approach and
provides a key direction for next generation software dened
networks.
Index TermsOpenFlow control plane, packet and circuit
switched networks convergence, quality-of-transmission aware-
ness, wavelength reassignment.
I. INTRODUCTION
R
Ecently, many interests have been taken in OpenFlow
as an approach to build up a software-dened network
(SDN) [2]. In traditional networks, the rmware of many
network devices (e.g., switches and routers) remained locked
and is under the control of their manufactures. The SDN
separates the control and data planes that researchers can
introduce new capabilities to manage the network. OpenFlow
[3] is an open-source approach aiming at building up an SDN.
OpenFlow network consists of several OpenFlow switches and
controllers. The controllers manage those OpenFlow switches
through OpenFlow protocol. Researchers can develop the
OpenFlow controller with new functionality such as Quality-
of-Transmission (QoT)-awareness (networks can recover from
ber cut-off, high impairments, etc.) which can help drive next
generation optical networks as well. The OpenFlow controller
(e.g. NOX [4]) is responsible for inserting ow entries into
OpenFlow switches. Packets will be forwarded according to
the entries matching elds (e.g. MAC/IP address).
Although many efforts have been taken in developing packet
networks with OpenFlow [5], the unication of packet and
circuit networks (i.e. electronic and optical networks conver-
gence) with OpenFlow is still at the very beginning stage
which can be found in [6], [7]. In [6] the authors unied the
packet and circuit networks with OpenFlow. In their networks,
the OpenFlow controller can become aware of packets drop
and recover it by increasing the bandwidth accordingly. In
[7], to unify the packet and circuit networks, the authors
developed OpenFlow-enabled photonic cross-connects (PXC)
as optical nodes, which are responsible for lightpath setup. In
[8], the authors develop the interworking between OpenFlow
Manuscript received December 21, 2012. The associate editor coordinating
the review of this letter and approving it for publication was A. Shami.
The authors are with the College of Optical Sciences, University of Ari-
zona, Tucson, AZ, 85721 USA (e-mail: {wmo, jhe, mkarbassian, jwissinger,
nasser}@optics.arizona.edu).
Digital Object Identier 10.1109/LCOMM.2013.031313.122873
control plane and PCE for path computation. For the path
computation, the precongured OSNR is a metric which is
taken into account.
Different from [8] which assumes a static OSNR value
for each optical link, we rst time study QoT-awareness
reassignment upon real-time OSNR measurement with an
Optical Performance Monitoring (OPM) [9] in converged
packet/circuit OpenFlow networks. QoT-aware Wavelength
reassignment or path re-route will be taken when low QoT
is detected.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II
describes the architecture of QoT-aware electronic and optical
networks with OpenFlow. The experimental demonstration
and results are presented in Section III. Finally, Section IV
concludes our works and provides directions for future works.
II. ARCHITECTURE OF QOT-AWARE PACKET AND
CIRCUIT SWITCHED NETWORKS WITH OPENFLOW
To support QoT-awareness in converged packet and circuit
switched networks with OpenFlow, we design an OpenFlow
translation agent can translate information into OpenFlow
protocol or vice versa.
As shown in Fig. 1, the agent enables the protocol trans-
lation for optical networks and OSNR readings. The agent
provides application programming interfaces(APIs) to collect
OSNR at a certain interval through General Purpose Interface
Bus (GPIB) protocol. The OSNR is put in a packet payload
and this packet is sent to the OpenFlow controller in packet-
in event format which is sdandardized in OpenFlow protocol
ver1.0. The OpenFlow controller gets OSNR payload and
sends a packet in packet-out event format conveying TL1
conguration payload to OF agent if the OSNR is below
the requirment. Then the OpenFlow agent will exchange
this information in TL1 protocol with optical nodes using
telnet. In addition, OpenFlow switches directly connect to and
communicate with the OpenFlow controller.
With the help of the OpenFlow agent, we enable the optical
nodes communicate with the OpenFlow controller and thus
make packet-circuit convergence with OpenFlow. Inserting
an OF agent will increase 2ms latency however its not
much compared with the whold processing time (3022ms).
Furthermore, it has some advantages to use a translation agent.
It is convenient to be managed. Currently, our OF agent has
a GUI and can connect to web service, thus make remote
control enabled. Secondly, compared with the virtual Ethernet
interfaces in [7] which need one more virtual OpenFlow switch
for each optical node (see Fig. 3 in [7]), we dont need
additional device to control the optical nodes. In addition, the
OpenFlow agent can provide generic application interfaces to
1089-7798/13$31.00 c 2013 IEEE
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2 IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION
Fig. 1. Architecture of QoT-aware packet switched and circuit switched
network with OpenFlow. The translation agent can translate (1) OSNR reading
from OPM into OpenFlow protocol. (2) Wavelength reassignment packet from
the controller into TL1 protocol. (3) Re-routing information.
collect different types of metrics from different device vendors
in the future, however which is hard to be realzied with a
single extended OpenFlow protocol.
In this work, the QoT is measured by the bit error rate
(BER) of the path. Assume the path consist of optical links
with BER
o
and electronic links with BER
e
. Then the BER of
the whole path is BER = 1 (1 BER
o
)(1 BER
e
). The
BER in electronic domain (BER
e
) is measured by counting
the error bits at electronic OpenFlow switches. The BER in
optical domain (BER
o
) is directly related to the optical signal
to noise ratio (OSNR) [10], which is real-time measured by
an OPM device.
Our architecture integrates optical networks with electronic
networks through the OpenFlow agent. The OpenFlow trans-
lation agent also collects the OPM readings, which is used as
a metric to determine the QoT in converged network. In our
future study, the OpenFlow translation agent can also get other
metrics controller such as energy consumption which can help
to save energy, and forward them to the controller.
III. EXPERIMENTAL PROCEDURES AND RESULTS
The experimental demonstration is based on Testbed for
Optical Aggregation Networks (TOAN) for OpenFlow elec-
tronic and optical networks at the University of Arizona.
TOAN consists of two Fujitsu Flashwave optical networking
nodes (FW) [11]. TOAN also includes several Pronto 3290
OpenFlow switches [12] which support OpenFlow 1.0 and
some PCs as end hosts connect to the Pronto switches.
TOAN also includes a 1Gbps IXIA trafc generator, ampli-
ers, a physical impairment generator and a dedicated OPM
device that monitors real-time OSNRs. The OPM module is
based on a 1/4-bit Mach-Zehnder Delay-Line Interferometer
(DLI) which can support multiple modulation formats and is
sensitive to the physical impairment [9].
To estimate BER
e
, we use the IXIA trafc generator to
transmit trafc through the Pronto switches for a week ( 6
10
5
seconds) and then count the error bit. The error bit in a
week is zero, and therefore the BER
e
less than 1.7 10
15
.
This value is negligible compared with the BER in optical
domain (which is 10
5
when video starts disruption), therefore
we just use BER
o
as the only parameter (measured by OSNR)
to determine the QoT in converged networks. In the following
experiments, we use OSNR which is measured by the OPM
to represent BER
o
. And we determine the OSNR threshold is
12dB (i.e. BER is 10
5
) when video starts disruption.
We accordingly developed our centralized controller based
on NOX and an OpenFlow translation agent. The agent sends
OSNR to the controller and parses signaling information
between OpenFlow controller and optical nodes (see Fig. 2-
4). In this paper, the OpenFlow controller has functionalities
of forwarding packets on a given path in Pronto switches,
setting up or deleting an optical link, reassigning a new clean
wavelength and an alternative route when QoT is low.
Our rst experiment is to show the electronic packet and
optical circuit switched networks convergence. In the second
experiment, the OpenFlow controller is aware of low QoT
and automatically recongures the optical nodes (i.e. FWs)
to reassign a new clean wavelength. In the third experiment,
under low QoT, the video stream will be rerouted if the
original paths QoT cannot satisfy the requirement. We had
10 trials and made a reasonable interval for OSNR reading.
In addition, we measured the processing time on each step
using Wireshark dissector.
A. The electronic packet and optical circuit switched networks
convergence with OpenFlow
The sequential procedures which the OpenFlow controls the
edge electronic packet switches and optical circuits (i.e., set
up the lightpath between two FWs) are depicted in Fig. 2 and
it is detailed as follows:
Step 1 : High denition (HD) video stream from PC1
reach the rst Pronto OpenFlow switch (Pronto 1).
Step 2: The packets do not match any ow entries in
the ow table of Pronto 1 and they are forwarded to the
OpenFlow controller. The rst two steps will take 1ms
in total.
Step 3: The OpenFlow controller inserts a ow entry into
Pronto 1 to forward these stream packets. This process
takes 1ms.
Step 4: The OpenFlow controller sends commands to
congure both FWs to set up the lightpath through
the OpenFlow agent. This will take 3020ms in average
(3000ms for WSS conguration time plus 20ms for
controller processing time)
Step 5: With the ow entry inserted in Pronto 1 and
lightpath setup, the video packets (UDP) from Pronto 1
are decapsulated and recapsulated into packet-over-WDM
at the optical node 1, and the reverse process happens at
the optical node 2 to recapsulate the received packet-
over-WDM into video packet (UDP) for Pronto 2. The
decapsulation/recapsulation is managed by the optical
nodes, not by the OF controller.
Step 6: The packets do not match any ow entries in
the ow table of Pronto 2 and they are forwarded to the
OpenFlow controller.
Step 7: The OpenFlow controller inserts a new ow entry
into Pronto 2 to forward these stream packets which takes
1ms.
Step 8: Stream packets are sent to the destination (PC2)
according to the ow entry in Pronto 2 and the video
starts.
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MO et al.: QUALITY OF TRANSMISSION AWARENESS IN CONVERGED ELECTRONIC AND OPTICAL NETWORKS WITH OPENFLOW 3
Fig. 2. Procedures of setting up the lightpath and forwarding packets to the
destination (PC1 PC2). The blue line shows the video stream. Each step is
differently colored to differentiate the optical domain and electronic domain.
In sum, the centralized OpenFlow controller only took 3122
milliseconds in average to set up a new connection including
inserting ow entries and lightpath setup. After the lightpath
is setup, the video streams.
B. QoT-Aware Wavelength Reassignment
In the second experiment the controller collects OSNR
reading every 5 seconds. This reading is sent from OPM
device to the OpenFlow agent through GPIB and then sent to
the controller. To emulate wavelength dependent noise, we use
a tunable lter to make the noise only on certain wavelength
range (i.e. 1551.72nm+/ 2nm). When the OSNR is below
an acceptable threshold (i.e. 12dB which is a starting point
for video degrade in this experiment) on this wavelength,
the OpenFlow controller congures the FWs (through the
OpenFlow agent) to assign a new clean wavelength (i.e.
1548.51nm) which is out of the noise range on the same path.
The video keeps the acceptable OSNR because it is out of the
affected wavelength range of the impairment.
The QoT-aware wavelength reassignment approach is shown
in Fig. 3 and summarized as follows:
Step 1: Initially, the video stream is carried over a 10Gbps
WDM channel at
1
= 1551.72 nm. Then the noise
impairs this channel and the OSNR drops below the
certain threshold. The video streams quality is impaired,
as shown in Fig. 4(a).
Step 2: The OPM senses the OSNRs and the measure-
ment is sent to the OpenFlow controller through Open-
Flow agent at a certain interval (i.e. every 5 seconds). The
time between OPM sends the OSNR to the controller gets
the OSNR takes 1ms.
Step 3: Since the OSNR is below the threshold, the
OpenFlow controller sends commands to the two FWs
through the OpenFlow agent to re-provision the video
stream to another clean channel at
2
= 1548.51nm. This
procedure will also take 3120ms in average.
Step 4: After the new wavelength is assigned, the OSNR
is again above the threshold and the video quality recov-
Fig. 3. Experimental Procedures of QoT-aware wavelength reassignment.
The blue line shows the video stream. Each step is differently colored to
differentiate the communication with optical nodes and OPM.
Fig. 4. Experimental results in QoT-aware networks with OpenFlow. (a)
The impaired video stream and (b) The recovered video after wavelength
reassignment.
ers as shown in Fig. 4(b). New OSNRs on
2
are sent to
the OpenFlow controller again every 5 seconds.
Since the total processing time is 3022ms, the 5s interval
is used to make we have extra time to let the new wavelength
assignment established and also ensure that the impairment be
quickly detected (5s). This allows us to read a settled OSNR
on the new wavelength. In addition, this interval time is long
enough for us to observe the video disruption and recovery.
C. QoT-Aware Path Re-routing
In this experiment, we expand the network with four Pronto
switches, the controller re-routes the video trafc (See Fig. 5)
to another path when OSNR is below the threshold. The
sequential procedures are depicted as follows:
Step 1: The video stream is carried over the clean optical
path initially. Then the noise impairs the optical channel
and the OSNR drops below the certain threshold.
Step 2: Since the OSNR is below the threshold, as
shown in Fig. 5, the controller re-routes the video to an
alternative path and releases the optical path.
The controller will still take 3022ms to release the optical
path, however the release time will not affect the video
recovery latency since the new path is established only in 4ms.
This time (4ms) is much faster than 3022ms and therefore
the required reading interval can be shorter. Note that for
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4 IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION
Fig. 5. Experimental Procedures of QoT-aware path re-routing. The video
will be forwarded on the alternative path when OSNR is below threshold.
experimental purpose, 5s reading interval is still used in
this part to have enough time for us to observe the video
disruption/recovery. This reading interval time could be shorter
for higher resolution.
IV. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we developed an OpenFlow controller and
an OpenFlow translation agent to support the convergence
of electronic packet and optical circuit switched networks
and provide QoT-awareness. The translation agent can collect
OSNR as the metric of QoT and translate them into OpenFlow
protocol for the controller. Our research has experimentally
shown that there are potential to support optical transport
nodes with QoT-awareness in OpenFlow-enabled networks.
The unied control plane (i) recongures the entire network
from electronic to optical elements; (ii) reduces the response
time for physical impairments to a few seconds in optical do-
main by reassigning a wavelength; (iii) dynamically allocates
a new alternative path in 4 milliseconds when QoT is low. The
study presented in this paper will benet the development of
control plane in electro-optical networks in the future, which
is the key direction toward realizing next generation networks.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This research was supported by the National Science Foun-
dation through Center for Integrated Access Networks (CIAN)
under grant number EEC-0812072.
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