Towards an Open Networking Architecture

Open Networking is a very relevant concept for the networking industry: including Over-The-Top providers as well as Telco operators. There are two main concepts to enable an open environment: Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and White-boxes. SDN solution allows operators to deploy different network elements with a common view of the hardware components. Regarding SDN, there are initiatives to define a standard interface to the devices, like OpenConfig and OpenROADM. Similarly, there is an important effort for network abstraction at the Open Networking Foundation for the optical layer and IETF for the IP layer.On the other hand, white-boxes decouples the bare-metal from the installed software in a network element; this is the so-called: Network Operating System (NOS). There are two main initiatives to work in white-boxes for telco networks: Open Compute Project (OCP) and Telecom Infra Project (TIP). TIP and OCP have worked on white boxes for IP and optical networks.This article presents how networks can evolve to an open networking architecture following an evolutionary approach levering on SDN and white-box technologies.