Design and implementation of the OFELIA FP7 facility: The European OpenFlow testbed

The growth of the Internet in terms of number of devices, the number of networks associated to each device and the mobility of devices and users makes the operation and management of the Internet network infrastructure a very complex challenge. In order to address this challenge, innovative solutions and ideas must be tested and evaluated in real network environments and not only based on simulations or laboratory setups. OFELIA is an European FP7 project and its main objective is to address the aforementioned challenge by building and operating a multi-layer, multi-technology and geographically distributed Future Internet testbed facility, where the network itself is precisely controlled and programmed by the experimenter using the emerging OpenFlow technology. This paper reports on the work done during the first half of the project, the lessons learned as well as the key advantages of the OFELIA facility for developing and testing new networking ideas. An overview on the challenges that have been faced on the design and implementation of the testbed facility is described, including the OFELIA Control Framework testbed management software. In addition, early operational experience of the facility since it was opened to the general public, providing five different testbeds or islands, is described

Deliverable DJRA1.2. Solutions and protocols proposal for the network control, management and monitoring in a virtualized network context

This deliverable presents several research proposals for the FEDERICA network, in different subjects, such as monitoring, routing, signalling, resource discovery, and isolation. For each topic one or more possible solutions are elaborated, explaining the background, functioning and the implications of the proposed solutions.This deliverable goes further on the research aspects within FEDERICA. First of all the architecture of the control plane for the FEDERICA infrastructure will be defined. Several possibilities could be implemented, using the basic FEDERICA infrastructure as a starting point. The focus on this document is the intra-domain aspects of the control plane and their properties. Also some inter-domain aspects are addressed. The main objective of this deliverable is to lay great stress on creating and implementing the prototype/tool for the FEDERICA slice-oriented control system using the appropriate framework. This deliverable goes deeply into the definition of the containers between entities and their syntax, preparing this tool for the future implementation of any kind of algorithm related to the control plane, for both to apply UPB policies or to configure it by hand. We opt for an open solution despite the real time limitations that we could have (for instance, opening web services connexions or applying fast recovering mechanisms). The application being developed is the central element in the control plane, and additional features must be added to this application. This control plane, from the functionality point of view, is composed by several procedures that provide a reliable application and that include some mechanisms or algorithms to be able to discover and assign resources to the user. To achieve this, several topics must be researched in order to propose new protocols for the virtual infrastructure. The topics and necessary features covered in this document include resource discovery, resource allocation, signalling, routing, isolation and monitoring. All these topics must be researched in order to find a good solution for the FEDERICA network. Some of these algorithms have started to be analyzed and will be expanded in the next deliverable. Current standardization and existing solutions have been investigated in order to find a good solution for FEDERICA. Resource discovery is an important issue within the FEDERICA network, as manual resource discovery is no option, due to scalability requirement. Furthermore, no standardization exists, so knowledge must be obtained from related work. Ideally, the proposed solutions for these topics should not only be adequate specifically for this infrastructure, but could also be applied to other virtualized networks.Postprint (published version

Design of next generation optical transmission systems

In this thesis investigations were performed into the design of optical channels for coherent optical fibre transmission systems for future optical networks. Firstly, an overview of traditional optical networks design and next generation concepts under research for the next generation of optical networks is given. The coherent receiver was then investigated experimentally as an investigative tool to provide information for channel provisioning, by fast C-band spectral analysis and estimating neighbouring channel power. An algorithm incorporated these two abilities and successfully provisioned a polarization multiplexed quadrature phase shift keying (PM-QPSK) signal in a populated system. Probabilistic versus traditional deterministic design methodology was examined to determine its advantages by perturbing intra-link optical power. Experimental results showed that due to the non-linearity of the transmission medium, a more ideal provisioning point could be determined. A three parameter model was proposed to fit the behaviour of optical power and was shown to fit the behaviour of a single channel system. A wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) system was then used to validate the model’s prediction ability with high accuracy. In light of the potential increased polarization dependent loss (PDL) of next generation optical networks, the influence of up to 6 dB distributed link PDL is investigated for a 35 Gbaud coherent WDM system over 120,000 discrete instantiations for PM-QPSK and polarization multiplexed 16-level quadrature amplitude modulation (PM-16QAM) using commercial transceivers. Less than a 1 dB penalty to SNR was observed for a 6 dB range of optical launch powers. This thesis concludes with a method for estimating the performance margin for a PM-16QAM system using a pre-existing PM-QPSK system with the intended use for adaptive change of modulation format on the fly. The largest error in estimation of this margin is less than 0.4 dB over a range of 4 dB optical launch powe