Software-Defined Networking for Free Space Optical Communications

Traditional IP networks lack the flexibility to respond to faults, network reconfiguration, and load changes in an ever-evolving digital society, which we call the Internet. To make matters worse, implementation of network policies requires configuration of each network device in which the control and data planes are coupled together using vendor specific commands. Software defined networking (SDN) is an emerging technology, which decouples the control plane from the data plane to provide flexibility in configuring/reconfiguring a network. In this manuscript, we present a SDN testbed using off-the-shelf components, write and deploy network applications onto the testbed, and demonstrate the functioning of the network application using a free space optical link.