An open line architecture to enable white-box optical ecosystem

Abstract The white-box optical ecosystem is considered as the future trend in transport networks, which includes the openness in both software and hardware. The openness in hardware decomposes the equipment into multiple independent components to reduce costs. And the openness in software including general YANG models make all components controllable, which enables fast innovation in the control plane of software-defined networking (SDN). In this paper, an open line architecture (OLA) is proposed to implement the openness and disaggregation to enable white-box optical ecosystem. OLA defines a transport application interface (TAPI) to provide a flexible control of the open line system. To build the physical network, OLA uses the optical equipment developed by different manufacturers that follows specific YANG specifications. And in the control plane, OLA develops a series of drivers and applications to control the calculation, creation, and deletion of optical connectivity service. Finally, the paper shows OLA in use as part of a testbed, which demonstrates the feasibility of building networks consisting of both open and disaggregated hardware.