INSPIRING-SNI: Investigating SDN Programmability Improving Optical South- and North- bound Interfaces

Software Defined Networking (SDN) controllers decouple the forwarding data-plane actions, instructed via south-bound interfaces (SBI), from the logic control-plane decisions, which can be decided by network applications exploiting the north-bound interfaces (NBI). This paper overviews the achievements of INPIRINGSNI, a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action that aims at enhancing programmability in optical SDN ecosystems from two perspectives: SBI for interacting with optical equipment and NBI for exposing programming abstractions that ease the development of network applications. INSPIRING-SNI focused on disaggregated approaches for SBI based on YANG models while proposing an innovative approach for the NBI based on the concept of network optimization as a service (OaaS) with an extension of the Net2Plan planning tool.