Building the Enhanced Control Plane of Next Generation Central Offices

The aim of this paper is to illustrate the Control Plane functionalities, strategies, and procedures in the Next Generation Central Offices, which are crucial traffic aggregation points close to the subscribers. The Next Generation Central Offices are becoming integral part of the next generation networks and for this reason the management and control of its internal resources is essential. Initially, the paper explains the Next Generation Central Offices system architecture and its placement within an end-to-end network. Then, it details the use cases and their quantitative analysis, taking into consideration a dense urban area in Paris city, for estimating the downlink and uplink throughput and latency related requirements. Based on these estimations, the paper defines the Next Generation Central Office Control Plane requirements, along with its functional architecture and its internal functional blocks, detailing their specific roles and interactions to meet the bandwidth and latency demands. Finally, the paper describes an early software prototype implementation based on ETSI TeraFlow SDN, highlighting the software extensions implemented for the support of the Next Generation Central Office Control Plane functionalities, strategies, and procedures. The paper concludes with the next steps for the future work, consisting of the integration with an actual Next Generation Central Office and a field trial experiment in an end-to-end network.