Lightpath restoration in SDN-based optical networks: Overview

Optical networks employ restoration methods to ensure efficient recovery of connections interrupted by network failures. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is emerging as the future network architectures and introduces new control planes for establishing, routing and managing optical connections in SDN-based optical networks. This paper provides a brief overview of existing SDN restoration mechanisms that can be used for lightpath restoration and also highlights restoration challenges experienced in the SDN environments.