Build to Tenants’ Requirements: On-Demand Application-Driven vSD-EON Slicing

Application-driven networks (ADNs) aim to build logically separate virtual networks (VNs) to meet the distinct demands of different applications. In this paper, we study how to realize the on-demand slicing of application-driven virtual software-defined elastic optical networks (vSD-EONs) based on the concept of ADN. We design the network system for on-demand application-driven vSD-EON slicing and demonstrate the building and operating of application-driven vSD-EONs with it experimentally. Specifically, our experimental demonstrations consider three scenarios: (1) the tenant’s application requires high availability for the data plane, (2) the tenant’s application is interactive and thus requires short end-to-end latency, and (3) the tenant’s application needs an enhanced physical-layer security guarantee. With an experimental testbed that consists of commercial optical transmission facilities, bandwidth-variable wavelength-selective switches, erbium-doped fiber amplifiers, and high-performance servers with both optical and electrical ports, we verify that the proposed vSD-EON slicing system can build vSD-EONs on-demand according to tenants’ application demands and operate them correctly.