Are WANs Ready for Optical Topology Programming?

Are WANs Ready for Optical Topology Programming?

Abstract

In today’s wide-area networks, the optical layer is a relatively static and inflexible commodity. In response, OpticalTopology Programming (OTP) has been proposed to enable fast and flexible reconfiguration of wavelengths at the optical layer from higher layers. We answer whether WANs are ready for OTP, concluding they are not. We reach this judgment by measuring reconfiguration delay on a long-haul fiber span. To push the needle on OTP towards feasibility, we show how to reduce the time to provision a circuit by an order of magnitude—from minutes to seconds. Finally, we propose a method to quickly store and load optical network equipment settings, reducing the time to less than 1 second.

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Authors
  • Hall, Matthew Nance
  • Barford, Paul
  • Foerster, Klaus-Tycho
  • Ghobadi, Manya
  • Jensen, William
  • Durairajan, Ramakrishnan
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Supplemental Material
Shortfacts
Category
Paper in Conference Proceedings or in Workshop Proceedings (Paper)
Event Title
ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Workshop on Optical Systems (OptSys’2021)
Divisions
Communication Technologies
Subjects
Rechnerperipherie, Datenkommunikationshardware
Event Location
Virtual Conference
Event Type
Workshop
Event Dates
23 Aug 2021
Date
23 August 2021
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