YAMATO: the first SDN Control Plane for Independent, Joint and Fractional-Joint Switched SDM Optical Networks

The deployment of space division multiplexed (SDM) optical networks hinges on this technology being able to offer a beneficial ratio between the expected capacity gains and the resulting cost increase. In order to keep the cost of SDM low, several integrated devices have been proposed to perform the functions of transmission, reception, amplification, and switching; however, little or no work has been carried out in creating a network model to represent their behavior, and in actually managing and controlling them, especially with respect to those devices that are able to jointly switch multiple spatial dimensions. This paper describes YAMATO, the first control plane designed to handle any type of SDM fiber and switching paradigm. To do so, we present a network model capable of encoding any SDM link and node, and describe the design and functions of our network controller, which is based on the OpenDaylight framework. Furthermore, we investigate the additional complexity faced by optical restoration schemes for SDM compared to standard optical networks. We experimentally evaluate the proposed system via an emulated testbed, and report some performance measurements of our implementation.