• sdn
• fast
• optimization

Today’s users continuously demand for interactive, content-rich and immersive networked experiences. These general demands impose increasingly stringent requirements on the delivery capability of the network infrastructure, not only in terms of bandwidth capacity but also in terms of responsiveness, adaptability and configurability. Network architectures whose resources are open to control by applications, i.e., service overlays, require the design of service-oriented capabilities that perform resource virtualization and service abstraction functions while exposing Application Programming Interfaces for collaborative and generalized data delivery services driven by applications.

The Service Oriented Optical Network (SOON) is a network service architecture that has been formerly conceived for the on-demand and dynamic provisioning of transport network services with a level of service abstraction and resource virtualization suitable for being activated by applications. The SOON has a technology-independent functional plane, named Service Plane (SP), which effectively mediates the application-to-network interaction through composition and orchestration of connectivity services provided by the (distributed) GMPLS Control Plane (CP). Recent advances in network control and management technologies, such as SDN and service-oriented networking paradigms, are expected to make the network effectively able to cope with application service requirements in a more flexible, timely, and agile manner.

This paper discusses how SOON could take advantage of SDN and provides an architectural shift to extend the SOON architecture to include OpenFlow capabilities and operate over an SDN-based networks. To this purpose, an SDN OpenFlow controller (Floodlight) has been exploited to build up an SDN application logic through which the SOON functions are provided while leveraging basic SDN-based (i.e., centralized) CP functions and OpenFlow protocol. A use case is illustrated on how the proposed architectural model could be effectively put into operation and is able to provide network service composition functions while programmatically addressing delivery of data across specified service components.