Live demonstration of SDN-enabled optical circuit switching at ECOC 2013
A live demonstration of a hybrid packet-optical circuit switched software-defined network (SDN) will take place at Europe's largest optical event next week. The European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC) will take place from 22- 26 September in London. Developed jointly by the High Performance Networks Group at the University of Bristol and Polatis, Inc , the SDN-enabled Polatis optical cross-connects will be used to demonstrate the efficiency benefits of hybrid packet-optical circuit switching architectures for dynamic management of large flows in datacentre applications such as virtual machine migration. The Bristol University team are the leading researchers in the extension of SDN protocols to support dynamic reconfiguration of circuit-switched optical network infrastructure, enabling greater efficiency, scalability and flexibility of high-capacity service provision. Professor Dimitra Simeonidou , Head of the High Performance Networks Group, said: "Unified software control of the physical layer is a key requirement for next generation networks. Adding SDN support to Polatis optical circuit switches brings dynamic reconfigurability to optical systems and enables us to explore new programmable architectures for efficient, high capacity, telecom and datacentre networks." OpenFlow is an emerging standard for SDN which can be used to control optical circuit switch (OCS) elements for applications such as router bypass for high capacity data centres, management of dark fibre network connectivity and advanced colourless, directionless and contention-less architectures.
