tSDX: Enabling Impairment-Aware All-Optical Inter-Domain Exchange

Optical transmission systems exist ubiquitously in data center, access, metro and long-haul networks, and are divided into different autonomous domains based on different carrier ownership, network equipment manufacturers, geographical location, etc. Software-defined Internet exchange methods have been proposed to solve the long-standing problem of inter-domain routing and enable control flexibility in layer-3 networks, and software-defined networking (SDN) has also been introduced to optical networks and much progress has been made to enhance optical network control capability. In this paper, we investigate a transparent software-defined exchange (tSDX) with real-time impairment-aware service level agreement (SLA) guarantees for multidomain optical networks. An SDN-based hierarchical control architecture is designed and implemented. End-to-end, impairment-aware wavelength path provisioning is experimentally realized in a multidomain network. Real-time optical signal to noise ratio based optical performance monitoring, together with inter-domain negotiation enabled by our proposed SDN control architecture, serves as an SLA guarantee for 100-Gbps polarization-multiplexed quadrature phase-shift keying signals in dense wavelength division multiplexed transmission.