DISMI - an intent interface for application-centric transport network services

Application-centric networking is a novel approach to construct transport networks that allows application-specific requirements to be taken into account through the entire service provisioning process: the service offered to each application is differentiated at each layer of the transport network, from IP to optical. This approach replaces the grooming of traffic with different requirements into a shared path in the transport layer, and allows for a finer control and utilization of network resources by network operators. To make this concept viable, an interface for requesting a connectivity service by applications requires an abstraction with respect to the various underlying network technologies. Interfaces based on the concept of Intents provide such an abstraction: applications can describe what they need from the network (their requirements) rather than how to achieve them. This paper describes the design and implementation of the solution we propose: DISMI, the Intent-based North-Bound Interface of a network controller.