Distributed intelligence for pervasive optical network telemetry

Optical network automation and failure management require measuring the status and the performance of the different network devices to anticipate any degradation and ensure the quality of the provided services, i.e., optical connectivity. Such pervasive network telemetry entails collecting large amounts of measurements and events from different sources and with very fine granularity, which given the amount and variety of telemetry sources and the size of each measurement and event, imposes requirements that are hard to achieve without large investments. In this paper, we analyze the main limitations of telemetry architectures relying exclusively on centralized systems for data analysis and propose an architecture with distributed intelligence. Data aggregation techniques, especially conceived for optical network telemetry, are presented with the objective of reducing data dimensionality. Illustrative results from our experimental telemetry system reveal a reduction of 3 orders of magnitude in terms of total data volume without introducing significant error and processing delay and, more importantly, helping network automation algorithms to identify meaningful changes in the network status.