Towards a transport SDN for carriers networks: An evolutionary perspective

Network operators have worked in interoperable scenarios for transport network from several years. The main motivation is to have a rich ecosystem, which encourages the competition to have more efficient network solutions. The bandwidth increment in the transport network puts a lot of pressure to have revenues on an environment where the end-user is willing to pay less and less for the service. Software Define Networks presents a new hope to achieve such desire multi-vendor interoperability. The aim of this paper is to present some architecture to enable interoperability in transport networks. Some of these architectures are market ready and they have been tried in the field, while there are some approaches which are under standardization.