Towards an Open-Source Framework for Jointly Emulating Control and Data Planes of Disaggregated Optical Networks

Software Defined Networking (SDN) principles in optical networks pursue disaggregated approaches, in which optical equipment is governed by the SDN controller with standard interfaces and common modelling abstractions. Software agents are a fundamental piece in disaggregated optical networks because they translate the commands from the SDN controller into specific actions to be performed by hardware equipment. In this paper, we rely on an existing framework for constructing software agents (Netopeer2-Sysrepo) and we discuss the common approach for the interaction between software agents and hardware equipment. Then, we report our preliminary advancements towards an optical emulation framework built on top of an automatic creation of agents. We use the OpenConfig-based model of Cassini and its ONOS driver, which are recent developments within TIP and ODTN initiatives, respectively.