ONF Open[1] Transport working group works since 2013 and getting more traction from optical vendors lately. One of the reasons is that for optical vendors ONF is a strong ally in grabbing market share from IP/MPLS competitors.
In April 2015 ONF published “Optical Transport Protocol Extensions” document, which “specifies a set of recommended extensions to the OpenFlow-Switch protocol to support the requirements for control of optical transport networks and equipment”[2].
In June 2016 ONF published “Functional Requirements for Transport API” document. “The purpose of this document is to specify the information that is relevant to an application programmer’s interface (API) to transport network-control functions and serve as a “Functional Requirements Document” (FRD) document for the transport API work in ONF”[3].
Together with other ONF’s Open Transport documents this creates a solid foundation for optical vendors to start implementing some OpenFlow-based functionality in more products.
OpenFlow-based management model should be considered for optical devices the same way as for IP/MPLS devices:
- as a way to challenge traditional vendors’ prices
as a target model allowing to enable innovative services in current devices and to migrate some services to white boxes in the end