Multi-Layer Network Analytics With SDN-based Monitoring Framework

Optical transport networks with expanding variety and volume of network data services challenge network provider's ability to provide high-quality service assurance and network managements. Software-defined networks (SDN) decouple the data plane and control plane and enable network programmability in optical networks with a centralized network controller. The optical network would become more dynamic in network architecture and require frequent network reconfigurations. The dynamic optical networks require all kinds of visibility into application data types, traffic flows and end-to-end connections. Thus, we propose an SDN-based monitoring framework that expands network analytics to a converged packet and optical network. With a designated monitoring hub, monitoring information from multiple layers are collected and processed in a centralized server. Several monitoring technologies are provided as network services with the architecture-on-demand optical node architecture. The developed network applications on top of SDN controller process all the collected monitoring information and enables multi-layer network analytics based the SDN-based monitoring framework. We demonstrate the proposed multi-layer network analytics successfully in several use cases. In the demonstrations, the multi-layer network analytics enables QoS recovery to avoid network disruption, optical power equalization at any combining device and network debugging and restoration in optical networks. The developed multi-layer network analytics provides powerful tools for network re-planning and optimization dynamically.