Experimental demonstration of remote unified control for OpenFlow-based software-defined optical access networks

Passive optical network (PON) has attracted much attention by the emergence of high-bitrate video-centric applications over the Internet in the access side. In the current commercial PON, the configuration of optical line termination equipment is needed to modify through network management system manually and periodically in the local areas. The traffic flow of different users lacks dynamic control and intelligent schedule. In this paper, we propose and implement a novel software-defined optical access network (SDOAN) architecture for remote unified control based on OpenFlow-enabled PON. Based on the proposed architecture, a service-aware flow scheduling strategy is introduced to flexibly and efficiently allocate the network bandwidth resources and detect the status of network flows in real time. The SDOAN can enhance the resource utilization and QoS guarantee of each user effectively through unified control manner, and reduce the operating expense by remote interaction and operation. We have designed and verified experimentally SDOAN on our test bed with OpenFlow-enabled OLTs. The overall feasibility and efficiency of the proposed architecture are also experimentally demonstrated and compared with interleaved polling with adaptive cycle time strategy in terms of resource occupation rate and average delay.