Andrew Lake

There have been a lot of proposals to unify the control and management of packet and circuit networks but none have been deployed widely. In this paper, we propose a sim- ple programmable architecture that abstracts a core transport node into a programmable virtual switch, that meshes well with the software-defined network paradigm while leverag- ing the OpenFlow protocol for control. A demonstration use-case of an OpenFlow-enabled optical virtual switch im- plementation managing a small optical transport network for big-data applications is described. With appropriate exten- sions to OpenFlow, we discuss how the programmability and flexibility SDN brings to packet-optical backbone networks will be substantial in solving some of the complex multi- vendor, multi-layer, multi-domain issues service providers face today.