Experimental Demonstration of a Fully Disaggregated and Automated White Box Comprised of Different Types of Transponders and Monitors

White boxes, originally introduced in data centers, are expected to soon also penetrate the market of wide area networks, since operators see them as a way to drive down capital expenditure. Indeed, white boxes can be composed of modules from different vendors, removing the traditional vendor lock-in and creating more competition in the market, thus reducing hardware costs. In this paper, we describe the experimental demonstration of a
fully disaggregated
white box, composed of two different types of transponders, monitors (including filtering effect parameter monitors), add-drop multiplexers, and switches. Toward this end, we developed an appropriate control and management plane for the white box based on NETCONF and YANG. Using that, we demonstrated the automatic reconfiguration of the white box so as to maintain the service in the presence of multiple unexpected degradations: signal-to-noise ratio decrease and filtering distortion. We also demonstrated and presented here a vendor-neutral procedure to compute the thresholds used for raising alarms in response to physical layer degradations.