An emulation environment for SDN enabled flexible IP/optical networks

Abstract

Elastic optical networks in conjunction with the Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm promise to serve the increasing networking requirements of current and future applications and services, providing on demand and scheduled capacity. We present an emulation environment for SDN-enabled, multi-layer and flexible IP/Optical networks, named Julius, based on Mininet, for the SDN network emulation and LINC-OE, for the optical emulation. Julius also integrates a Path Computation Element (PCE) client that communicates with any standard PCE. Julius can be used for basic and applied research on protocols (e.g., OpenFlow, PCEP) extensions and resource reservation/routing algorithms