Fast Lightpath Hopping Enabled by Time Synchronization for Optical Network Security

In this letter, we propose a novel SDN-based fast lightpath hopping (LPH) mechanism enabled by time synchronization to protect optical networks from eavesdropping and jamming. In order to realize fast LPH in optical networks, we establish an SDN-based LPH routing and signalling architecture, and set up an integer linear programming (ILP) model for fewest-shared-link multipath computation. We also demonstrate the first fast LPH prototype experiment and results show that an extremely high hop rate upto 1 MHz can be achieved with acceptable bit error rates (BERs) by control/switching separation and precise timing.