UEssex working on integration of ADVA optical components

As part of the OFELIA experimental facility, the island of the University of Essex (hpn.essex.ac.uk) will allow researchers and experimenters to conduct innovative and novel investigations on slices of OpenFlow enabled Ethernet switched. In the first phase of the OFELIA project, the island of university of Essex, includes four OpenFlow enabled Ethernet switches (NEC IP8800/S3640-24T2XW), three carrier grade Ethernet switches (Extreme BlackDiamond 12804) along with one Calient Diamond Wave fibre switch. An experimental mesh network topology can be created using the NEC switches. A 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GE) link from JANET (UK’s National Research and Educational Research Network), which terminates on Carrier Grade Extreme Black Diamond Switch provides the Internet connectivity of the UEssex island.

In the next step of the OFELIA project, three optical Reconfigurable Add/Drop Multiplexers (ROADMs) (ADVA FSP 3000) will be integrated to the UEssex island. In a joint collaborative effort, University of Essex (http://hpn.essex.ac.uk) and ADVA Optical Networking (www.advaoptical.com) will develop the required software to integrate these optical equipments into the OFELIA federated islands. The initial approach is to provide the OpenFlow functionalities on top of the GMPLS-based control plane of the optical equipments. The HPN group has recently performed an experiment to integrate its virtualized Calient fiber switches controlled by an OpenSource GMPLS control plane into the OpenFlow networking environment, by developing an extended OpenFlow controller. The initial approach will represent the optical equipments to the experimenters as an OpenFlow enabled switch and the add/drop ports of the ROADMs will play the role of the OpenFlow switch ports. The internal connectivity in the circuit switched domain (optical domain) will be controlled by an extended OpenFlow controller and GMPLS control plane following an overlay approach.