Making powerful friends: Introducing ONOS and Net2Plan to each other

In this paper, we present our efforts for integrating network control and network planning, connecting the popular open-source ONOS control platform with Net2Plan, an open source network planner. The integration allows ONOS to use Net2Plan, combined with our resource allocation framework, as an on-line network optimization tool, calculating and re-routing paths as new requests arrive. It also lets Net2Plan obtain an up-to-date topology from ONOS. Net2Plan can then use the topology and our algorithms to perform planning operations such as investigating hypothetical questions about consequences of network failures or additional network equipment. The interface also lets the paths computed by the algorithms running on Net2Plan to be transferred to ONOS and implemented in the running network. While we currently only support IP/Optical networks, additional layers could easily be incorporated. As an interesting side-effect, code used for network simulation can be instrumented and applied to the real network.